A sweeping, ambitious story reminiscent at times of Pasternak in its grasp of both history and tragedy.
Voices whisper, fearful and secretive, across the generations in Russian novelist Ulitskaya’s (The Kukotsky Enigma, 2016, etc.) latest.
Nora Ossetsky is a Soviet icon of a kind, a single mother who resolutely raises her child alone while working to advance the cause of the fatherland. But, alas, in those days of Brezhnev and an arteriosclerotic state, she’s a bit of a bohemian, involved with a brilliant theater director who has decided that it would be better to wait out the repression back home with his wife in Tbilisi, a defeated retreat from Moscow after a staging of Chekhov is shut down on the eve of its premiere, having enraged “the ministerial special forces, the Party hacks" with its subtly subversive staging. Russian theater lies at the heart of Ulitskaya’s richly detailed story, which takes its title, subtly as well, from the musical Fiddler on the Roof, but so too do epic, multigenerational works of fiction—for underlying Nora’s story are those of her parents and grandparents, the latter from the revolutionary generation. The patriarch of the family is the watchmaker Pinchas Kerns, who has emigrated from Switzerland in time to watch the first stirrings of the anti-czarist uprisings; largely indifferent to politics—“He remained a craftsman all his life, and never quite grasped the finer, or even cruder, points of communism, much less capitalism”—Pinchas and his children are nevertheless swept up by events: war, the rise of the Stalinist state, and soon enough the gulag. “Even such a giant among men as Dostoevsky feared the horror of loneliness!” writes Nora’s grandfather Jacob, in a diary that tracks the horror not just of loneliness, but of being separated from family and society for the crime of being one whose “thinking was out of step.” Life improves for Nora with the end of the USSR, but even in 2011, at the end of the book, when “old age caught up with her," the fear remains.
A sweeping, ambitious story reminiscent at times of Pasternak in its grasp of both history and tragedy.Pub Date: July 9, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-374-29365-9
Page Count: 560
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: April 13, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2019
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
PROFILES
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
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