An intriguing but imperfect attempt to translate the subtlety and poise of Bishop’s poetry into prose.
Inspired by a missing period in poet Elizabeth Bishop’s journals, Wieland (Land of Enchantment, 2015, etc.) imagines her adventures in France on the brink of World War II.
Although the bulk of the action takes place in 1936 and ’37, we first meet Elizabeth as an undergraduate at Vassar in 1930. She relishes conversations with her roommate, Margaret, as involved with painting as Elizabeth is with poetry, and envies Margaret’s relationship with her mother; Elizabeth’s has been in a mental institution since she was 5. Elizabeth already drinks more than is wise, but that doesn’t keep her from connecting with Marianne Moore, who becomes her mentor, and from attracting the attention of Robert, a sweet young man she could maybe love, if she were interested in men. By the time she sails for France in 1936 with her well-connected friend Louise, the two women are lovers, or at least, Wieland has implied that in the oblique style that characterizes the entire novel. It’s equally unclear why the three German women they meet in Douarnenez have left Berlin, nor do things become clearer in Paris. There, Elizabeth meets Sylvia Beach, Natalie Barney, and German deputy ambassador Ernst vom Rath, whose assassination (the pretext for Kristallnacht) is alluded to but remains as murky as everything else in a finely written but frustrating narrative. Wieland creates an unsettled, dread-soaked atmosphere appropriate to the period, with ugly scenes of Jew baiting and inexplicable German rage, but it’s no substitute for character development. The facts that Elizabeth yearns for her lost mother and that Marianne Moore has urged her to engage with the world don’t seem adequate to explain why the poet agrees to help French aristocrat Clara smuggle two Jewish infants to safety in a Paris convent. A hasty wrap-up that whisks from 1938 to 1979 in 25 fragmentary pages reinforces the impression of an author not quite sure what she intends.
An intriguing but imperfect attempt to translate the subtlety and poise of Bishop’s poetry into prose.Pub Date: June 11, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-5011-9721-5
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: March 17, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2019
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Still, a respectful and absorbing page-turner.
Hannah’s new novel is an homage to the extraordinary courage and endurance of Frenchwomen during World War II.
In 1995, an elderly unnamed widow is moving into an Oregon nursing home on the urging of her controlling son, Julien, a surgeon. This trajectory is interrupted when she receives an invitation to return to France to attend a ceremony honoring passeurs: people who aided the escape of others during the war. Cut to spring, 1940: Viann has said goodbye to husband Antoine, who's off to hold the Maginot line against invading Germans. She returns to tending her small farm, Le Jardin, in the Loire Valley, teaching at the local school and coping with daughter Sophie’s adolescent rebellion. Soon, that world is upended: The Germans march into Paris and refugees flee south, overrunning Viann’s land. Her long-estranged younger sister, Isabelle, who has been kicked out of multiple convent schools, is sent to Le Jardin by Julien, their father in Paris, a drunken, decidedly unpaternal Great War veteran. As the depredations increase in the occupied zone—food rationing, systematic looting, and the billeting of a German officer, Capt. Beck, at Le Jardin—Isabelle’s outspokenness is a liability. She joins the Resistance, volunteering for dangerous duty: shepherding downed Allied airmen across the Pyrenees to Spain. Code-named the Nightingale, Isabelle will rescue many before she's captured. Meanwhile, Viann’s journey from passive to active resistance is less dramatic but no less wrenching. Hannah vividly demonstrates how the Nazis, through starvation, intimidation and barbarity both casual and calculated, demoralized the French, engineering a community collapse that enabled the deportations and deaths of more than 70,000 Jews. Hannah’s proven storytelling skills are ideally suited to depicting such cataclysmic events, but her tendency to sentimentalize undermines the gravitas of this tale.
Still, a respectful and absorbing page-turner.Pub Date: Feb. 3, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-312-57722-3
Page Count: 448
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Nov. 19, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2014
BOOK TO SCREEN
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
Miller makes Homer pertinent to women facing 21st-century monsters.
A retelling of ancient Greek lore gives exhilarating voice to a witch.
“Monsters are a boon for gods. Imagine all the prayers.” So says Circe, a sly, petulant, and finally commanding voice that narrates the entirety of Miller’s dazzling second novel. The writer returns to Homer, the wellspring that led her to an Orange Prize for The Song of Achilles (2012). This time, she dips into The Odyssey for the legend of Circe, a nymph who turns Odysseus’ crew of men into pigs. The novel, with its distinctive feminist tang, starts with the sentence: “When I was born, the name for what I was did not exist.” Readers will relish following the puzzle of this unpromising daughter of the sun god Helios and his wife, Perse, who had negligible use for their child. It takes banishment to the island Aeaea for Circe to sense her calling as a sorceress: “I will not be like a bird bred in a cage, I thought, too dull to fly even when the door stands open. I stepped into those woods and my life began.” This lonely, scorned figure learns herbs and potions, surrounds herself with lions, and, in a heart-stopping chapter, outwits the monster Scylla to propel Daedalus and his boat to safety. She makes lovers of Hermes and then two mortal men. She midwifes the birth of the Minotaur on Crete and performs her own C-section. And as she grows in power, she muses that “not even Odysseus could talk his way past [her] witchcraft. He had talked his way past the witch instead.” Circe’s fascination with mortals becomes the book’s marrow and delivers its thrilling ending. All the while, the supernatural sits intriguingly alongside “the tonic of ordinary things.” A few passages coil toward melodrama, and one inelegant line after a rape seems jarringly modern, but the spell holds fast. Expect Miller’s readership to mushroom like one of Circe’s spells.
Miller makes Homer pertinent to women facing 21st-century monsters.Pub Date: April 10, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-316-55634-7
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Jan. 22, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2018
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