Initially, and fitfully engrossing, but the book turns into a harangue that just doesn’t know when to stop.
The brutality and carnage that comprise the legacy of Francisco Franco’s “Republican” regime reshape and afflict several lives in Catalan playwright and screenwriter Baulenas’s accusatory novel.
The present actions occur in 1949, when protagonist and narrator Genís Aleu, a sergeant in the Spanish Foreign Legion, returns to Barcelona following an eight-year exile—resolved to fulfill a promise made to his father Joan, who died in a prisoner of war camp. The past that burdens Genís is revealed in juxtaposed chapters that depict his family’s wartime experiences: how Joan, a commercial sign painter, was drawn into the chaos of Spain’s Civil War; the sufferings of his wife and son (then called “Niso”), when the latter was sent to a Dickensian Charity Home; and the burden accepted by Niso when his father, released and sent home to die, charged the boy with finding and reburying the body of Joan’s comrade Bartomeu Camús, who had been executed for loudly protesting the Franco regime’s many crimes against humanity. Baulenas gets good suspenseful mileage out of gradual discoveries made by the adult Genís (and hence the reader). The novel is especially compelling in scenes set at the charity home, and it’s also good at depicting the ironic circumstances of Genís’s return: He is assigned to lecture and recruit future foreign legionnaires at the combat-training facility built on the site of the former POW camp. There are vivid characterizations of Niso’s unflappable friend and mentor at the home, “No-Sister-Salvador”; of compassionate Sister Paula, who arouses both Niso’s social conscience and his embryonic libido; and of Genís’s Barcelona contact, flinty Major Cedazo, who will play a crucial role in the novel’s bitter denouement. But Baulenas repeatedly overstates his case, exposing his plot’s essential thinness while indulging in hyperbolic (albeit just, and perfectly understandable) excoriations of Franco and his murderous minions.
Initially, and fitfully engrossing, but the book turns into a harangue that just doesn’t know when to stop.Pub Date: July 1, 2008
ISBN: 978-0-15-101255-8
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Harcourt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2008
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
Coelho's placebo has racked up impressive sales in Brazil and Europe. Americans should flock to it like gulls.
Coelho is a Brazilian writer with four books to his credit. Following Diary of a Magus (1992—not reviewed) came this book, published in Brazil in 1988: it's an interdenominational, transcendental, inspirational fable—in other words, a bag of wind.
The story is about a youth empowered to follow his dream. Santiago is an Andalusian shepherd boy who learns through a dream of a treasure in the Egyptian pyramids. An old man, the king of Salem, the first of various spiritual guides, tells the boy that he has discovered his destiny: "to realize one's destiny is a person's only real obligation." So Santiago sells his sheep, sails to Tangier, is tricked out of his money, regains it through hard work, crosses the desert with a caravan, stops at an oasis long enough to fall in love, escapes from warring tribesmen by performing a miracle, reaches the pyramids, and eventually gets both the gold and the girl. Along the way he meets an Englishman who describes the Soul of the World; the desert woman Fatima, who teaches him the Language of the World; and an alchemist who says, "Listen to your heart" A message clings like ivy to every encounter; everyone, but everyone, has to put in their two cents' worth, from the crystal merchant to the camel driver ("concentrate always on the present, you'll be a happy man"). The absence of characterization and overall blandness suggest authorship by a committee of self-improvement pundits—a far cry from Saint- Exupery's The Little Prince: that flagship of the genre was a genuine charmer because it clearly derived from a quirky, individual sensibility.
Coelho's placebo has racked up impressive sales in Brazil and Europe. Americans should flock to it like gulls.Pub Date: July 1, 1993
ISBN: 0-06-250217-4
Page Count: 192
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1993
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
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