An arresting evocation of memory, community, and suffering.
In this searingly lyrical work, a young child bears witness to her family’s past.
“Grandmother signals with her hand, she wants me to follow.” So begins this remarkable book about the experiences of a Slovenian family in the 20th century. The narrator, a young girl at the novel’s beginning, is about to be shown her grandmother’s kitchen. But her grandmother might as well be leading her into memory, for it’s primarily the past to which she’s being introduced. Haderlap, an award-winning poet and writer, has based this novel on her own family’s experiences during the second world war. Her grandmother survived a concentration camp. Her father, still a child, was tortured by German police officers; by age 12, he’d gone off to fight with the partisans. Their neighbors in this small village just barely across the Austrian border fared similarly. It is a community of hardship and suffering. Haderlap’s narrator listens, horrified and rapt, to her father’s and grandmother’s stories. When neighbors discuss their own experiences, she stands “near the door left ajar and listen[s].” As she herself says, “The child understands that it’s the past she must reckon with.” For the past is not static and distant. Instead, “that time reaches out to grab me,” as sinuous and supple as any living thing. By now, decades have passed since the end of the war, but in this family, in this community, every detail, no matter how small, points back to that time, as the arrows in a compass point north. One night, the narrator observes her father smoking outside their house with a few other men. “Stanko is telling them that whenever he sees a cigarette glimmer in the dark, a firefly flutter past, or even someone strike a match, it’s always a shock for him, because it reminds him of the partisans who smoked in the dark.” Haderlap excels when, like here, she allows her characters to speak for themselves, to tell their own stories. But her book falters in more self-indulgent passages when she seems to lose herself in her own thoughts. Her mother is conspicuously absent from most of the book, and her own evolution as a thinker and writer could have used more patient description. Still, Haderlap’s is a significant achievement, hopefully a herald of more to come.
An arresting evocation of memory, community, and suffering.Pub Date: Aug. 16, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-914671-46-6
Page Count: 291
Publisher: Archipelago
Review Posted Online: June 21, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2016
Characters flip between bottomless self-regard and pitiless self-loathing while, as late as the second-to-last chapter, yet...
Four Chicago sisters anchor a sharp, sly family story of feminine guile and guilt.
Newcomer Lombardo brews all seven deadly sins into a fun and brimming tale of an unapologetically bougie couple and their unruly daughters. In the opening scene, Liza Sorenson, daughter No. 3, flirts with a groomsman at her sister’s wedding. “There’s four of you?” he asked. “What’s that like?” Her retort: “It’s a vast hormonal hellscape. A marathon of instability and hair products.” Thus begins a story bristling with a particular kind of female intel. When Wendy, the oldest, sets her sights on a mate, she “made sure she left her mark throughout his house—soy milk in the fridge, box of tampons under the sink, surreptitious spritzes of her Bulgari musk on the sheets.” Turbulent Wendy is the novel’s best character, exuding a delectable bratty-ness. The parents—Marilyn, all pluck and busy optimism, and David, a genial family doctor—strike their offspring as impossibly happy. Lombardo levels this vision by interspersing chapters of the Sorenson parents’ early lean times with chapters about their daughters’ wobbly forays into adulthood. The central story unfurls over a single event-choked year, begun by Wendy, who unlatches a closed adoption and springs on her family the boy her stuffy married sister, Violet, gave away 15 years earlier. (The sisters improbably kept David and Marilyn clueless with a phony study-abroad scheme.) Into this churn, Lombardo adds cancer, infidelity, a heart attack, another unplanned pregnancy, a stillbirth, and an office crush for David. Meanwhile, youngest daughter Grace perpetrates a whopper, and “every day the lie was growing like mold, furring her judgment.” The writing here is silky, if occasionally overwrought. Still, the deft touches—a neighborhood fundraiser for a Little Free Library, a Twilight character as erotic touchstone—delight. The class calibrations are divine even as the utter apolitical whiteness of the Sorenson world becomes hard to fathom.
Characters flip between bottomless self-regard and pitiless self-loathing while, as late as the second-to-last chapter, yet another pleasurable tendril of sisterly malice uncurls.Pub Date: June 25, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-385-54425-2
Page Count: 544
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: March 3, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2019
SEEN & HEARD
Too beholden to sentimentality and cliché, this novel fails to establish a uniquely realized perspective.
Hunter’s debut novel tracks the experiences of her family members during the Holocaust.
Sol and Nechuma Kurc, wealthy, cultured Jews in Radom, Poland, are successful shop owners; they and their grown children live a comfortable lifestyle. But that lifestyle is no protection against the onslaught of the Holocaust, which eventually scatters the members of the Kurc family among several continents. Genek, the oldest son, is exiled with his wife to a Siberian gulag. Halina, youngest of all the children, works to protect her family alongside her resistance-fighter husband. Addy, middle child, a composer and engineer before the war breaks out, leaves Europe on one of the last passenger ships, ending up thousands of miles away. Then, too, there are Mila and Felicia, Jakob and Bella, each with their own share of struggles—pain endured, horrors witnessed. Hunter conducted extensive research after learning that her grandfather (Addy in the book) survived the Holocaust. The research shows: her novel is thorough and precise in its details. It’s less precise in its language, however, which frequently relies on cliché. “You’ll get only one shot at this,” Halina thinks, enacting a plan to save her husband. “Don’t botch it.” Later, Genek, confronting a routine bit of paperwork, must decide whether or not to hide his Jewishness. “That form is a deal breaker,” he tells himself. “It’s life and death.” And: “They are low, it seems, on good fortune. And something tells him they’ll need it.” Worse than these stale phrases, though, are the moments when Hunter’s writing is entirely inadequate for the subject matter at hand. Genek, describing the gulag, calls the nearest town “a total shitscape.” This is a low point for Hunter’s writing; elsewhere in the novel, it’s stronger. Still, the characters remain flat and unknowable, while the novel itself is predictable. At this point, more than half a century’s worth of fiction and film has been inspired by the Holocaust—a weighty and imposing tradition. Hunter, it seems, hasn’t been able to break free from her dependence on it.
Too beholden to sentimentality and cliché, this novel fails to establish a uniquely realized perspective.Pub Date: Feb. 14, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-399-56308-9
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: Nov. 21, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2016
BOOK TO SCREEN
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