The past illuminates the present, though it takes a while for the novel to find the light.
An elliptical novel that encompasses history, anarchy, and love.
Translated from the Czech, Platzová's (Aaron’s Leap, 2014) latest bridges a century of social foment, as it involves the attempt by a contemporary Czech historian, during the Occupy Wall Street movement, to shed some light on what might be an anarchist in his closet. The setup is a little unwieldy: on the basis of conjecture and tangential evidence bequeathed to him by his best friend, a middle-aged historian who was raised in Prague but now lives in Manhattan thinks he might be related to a notorious anarchist who attempted to murder an American tycoon in the early 20th century. His investigation leads him to correspondence between the tycoon’s heirs and to a meeting with one who has repudiated that legacy and become a nun. There is also plenty of correspondence between the anarchist and his lover/comrade. And after the first section of the novel flashes between the present and the past, with the protagonist narrating in the first person, the second part is a notebook by his late friend detailing the lives of the deported anarchists, the lovers whose principles preclude monogamy. The reader thus works his or her way through a lot of structural baggage to arrive at the novel’s essence as it explores anarchy through the broader contexts of environmental apocalypse and capitalism’s self-destruction. One character believes that anarchy is “the only social theory based on human goodness,” though the anarchist to whom the narrator might be related ultimately believes that “Man can’t be reduced to his role in the hierarchy of economic relations. The problem lies elsewhere. Money is just a derivative evil. It isn’t enough to change the economic order!” The narrator’s excavation of the past puts the Occupy movement in different perspective by the time the novel concludes. As for the mystery of the blood ties that spurred his research, “it made no difference” whether he was related to the anarchist or not.
The past illuminates the present, though it takes a while for the novel to find the light.Pub Date: May 10, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-942658-08-5
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Bellevue Literary Press
Review Posted Online: March 2, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2016
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
Suspenseful, full of incident, and not obviously necessary.
Atwood goes back to Gilead.
The Handmaid’s Tale (1985), consistently regarded as a masterpiece of 20th-century literature, has gained new attention in recent years with the success of the Hulu series as well as fresh appreciation from readers who feel like this story has new relevance in America’s current political climate. Atwood herself has spoken about how news headlines have made her dystopian fiction seem eerily plausible, and it’s not difficult to imagine her wanting to revisit Gilead as the TV show has sped past where her narrative ended. Like the novel that preceded it, this sequel is presented as found documents—first-person accounts of life inside a misogynistic theocracy from three informants. There is Agnes Jemima, a girl who rejects the marriage her family arranges for her but still has faith in God and Gilead. There’s Daisy, who learns on her 16th birthday that her whole life has been a lie. And there's Aunt Lydia, the woman responsible for turning women into Handmaids. This approach gives readers insight into different aspects of life inside and outside Gilead, but it also leads to a book that sometimes feels overstuffed. The Handmaid’s Tale combined exquisite lyricism with a powerful sense of urgency, as if a thoughtful, perceptive woman was racing against time to give witness to her experience. That narrator hinted at more than she said; Atwood seemed to trust readers to fill in the gaps. This dynamic created an atmosphere of intimacy. However curious we might be about Gilead and the resistance operating outside that country, what we learn here is that what Atwood left unsaid in the first novel generated more horror and outrage than explicit detail can. And the more we get to know Agnes, Daisy, and Aunt Lydia, the less convincing they become. It’s hard, of course, to compete with a beloved classic, so maybe the best way to read this new book is to forget about The Handmaid’s Tale and enjoy it as an artful feminist thriller.
Suspenseful, full of incident, and not obviously necessary.Pub Date: Sept. 10, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-385-54378-1
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Nan A. Talese
Review Posted Online: Sept. 3, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2019
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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