by Margaret Wurtele ‧ RELEASE DATE: Feb. 7, 2012
Giovanna is a wonderful character full of human contradictions, but the novel bogs down once she becomes a conventional...
In Wurtele’s first novel a foolish young Italian girl matures into a caring woman and develops political awareness during World War II.
The daughter of wealthy Tuscan estate owners whose home has largely been requisitioned by German officers, Giovanna Bellini is a pampered 17-year-old during the German occupation in 1943. Having graduated from the local Catholic academy, she grudgingly helps the nuns tutor refugee children. Although her older brother Giorgio has run away to join the resistance, she also begins a flirtation with Klaus, a married German officer who she notes is an engineer and not a member of the SS. Wurtele meticulously delineates Giovanna’s giddy crush on Klaus, as well as her conflicting self-justification and guilt while purposely keeping Klaus’ motives ambiguous so that as events unfold the reader never knows his role—despite the sense of responsibility Giovanna assumes. After a nun catches the two having a rendezvous and tells Giovanna’s parents, she arranges one last assignation during which Klaus gets angry when she breaks things off. Meanwhile Giorgio enlists her help in smuggling food and supplies to the partisans. Her work is supposed to be secret, yet she involves an ever-widening circle of friends in the effort. Incredibly, none leaks a word to the enemy. Through Giorgio she meets Mario, an injured partisan who shares a similar upper-class Italian background except that he happens to be Jewish. Giovanna, already doubting that she wants the conventional, safe life her loving but narrow-minded parents expect for her, becomes aware of her own ignorance about the plight of Italian Jews and of her own father’s self-serving if genteel anti-Semitism. Mario’s injury becomes infected. With help from an unexpected source, she finds him a safe hiding place to recover, then steals him life-saving penicillin from the secret clinic run by a neighboring marchesa, Giovanna’s moral mentor. Love also blossoms, the American forces approach, but risks remain high.
Giovanna is a wonderful character full of human contradictions, but the novel bogs down once she becomes a conventional noble heroine.Pub Date: Feb. 7, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-451-23708-8
Page Count: 320
Publisher: New American Library
Review Posted Online: Dec. 18, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2012
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by Roy Jacobsen ; translated by Don Bartlett & Don Shaw ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 7, 2020
A deeply satisfying novel, both sensuously vivid and remarkably poignant.
Norwegian novelist Jacobsen folds a quietly powerful coming-of-age story into a rendition of daily life on one of Norway’s rural islands a hundred years ago in a novel that was shortlisted for the 2017 Man Booker International Prize.
Ingrid Barrøy, her father, Hans, mother, Maria, grandfather Martin, and slightly addled aunt Barbro are the owners and sole inhabitants of Barrøy Island, one of numerous small family-owned islands in an area of Norway barely touched by the outside world. The novel follows Ingrid from age 3 through a carefree early childhood of endless small chores, simple pleasures, and unquestioned familial love into her more ambivalent adolescence attending school off the island and becoming aware of the outside world, then finally into young womanhood when she must make difficult choices. Readers will share Ingrid’s adoration of her father, whose sense of responsibility conflicts with his romantic nature. He adores Maria, despite what he calls her “la-di-da” ways, and is devoted to Ingrid. Twice he finds work on the mainland for his sister, Barbro, but, afraid she’ll be unhappy, he brings her home both times. Rooted to the land where he farms and tied to the sea where he fishes, Hans struggles to maintain his family’s hardscrabble existence on an island where every repair is a struggle against the elements. But his efforts are Sisyphean. Life as a Barrøy on Barrøy remains precarious. Changes do occur in men’s and women’s roles, reflected in part by who gets a literal chair to sit on at meals, while world crises—a war, Sweden’s financial troubles—have unexpected impact. Yet the drama here occurs in small increments, season by season, following nature’s rhythm through deaths and births, moments of joy and deep sorrow. The translator’s decision to use roughly translated phrases in conversation—i.e., “Tha’s goen’ nohvar” for "You’re going nowhere")—slows the reading down at first but ends up drawing readers more deeply into the world of Barrøy and its prickly, intensely alive inhabitants.
A deeply satisfying novel, both sensuously vivid and remarkably poignant.Pub Date: April 7, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-77196-319-0
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Biblioasis
Review Posted Online: Jan. 12, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2020
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by Roy Jacobsen ; translated by Don Bartlett & Don Shaw
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by Amor Towles ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 6, 2016
A masterly encapsulation of modern Russian history, this book more than fulfills the promise of Towles' stylish debut, Rules...
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Sentenced to house arrest in Moscow's Metropol Hotel by a Bolshevik tribunal for writing a poem deemed to encourage revolt, Count Alexander Rostov nonetheless lives the fullest of lives, discovering the depths of his humanity.
Inside the elegant Metropol, located near the Kremlin and the Bolshoi, the Count slowly adjusts to circumstances as a "Former Person." He makes do with the attic room, to which he is banished after residing for years in a posh third-floor suite. A man of refined taste in wine, food, and literature, he strives to maintain a daily routine, exploring the nooks and crannies of the hotel, bonding with staff, accepting the advances of attractive women, and forming what proves to be a deeply meaningful relationship with a spirited young girl, Nina. "We are bound to find comfort from the notion that it takes generations for a way of life to fade," says the companionable narrator. For the Count, that way of life ultimately becomes less about aristocratic airs and privilege than generosity and devotion. Spread across four decades, this is in all ways a great novel, a nonstop pleasure brimming with charm, personal wisdom, and philosophic insight. Though Stalin and Khrushchev make their presences felt, Towles largely treats politics as a dark, distant shadow. The chill of the political events occurring outside the Metropol is certainly felt, but for the Count and his friends, the passage of time is "like the turn of a kaleidoscope." Not for nothing is Casablanca his favorite film. This is a book in which the cruelties of the age can't begin to erase the glories of real human connection and the memories it leaves behind.
A masterly encapsulation of modern Russian history, this book more than fulfills the promise of Towles' stylish debut, Rules of Civility (2011).Pub Date: Sept. 6, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-670-02619-7
Page Count: 480
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: June 20, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2016
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edited by Amor Towles ; series editor: Otto Penzler
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