It’s hard to resist using the word “symphonic” to describe this exquisitely composed, piercingly moving story. De Moor...
This fifth translated novel from the Dutch classical singer-turned-novelist (The Kreutzer Sonata, 2005, etc.) offers a moving dramatization of a historical catastrophe which bears disturbing resemblances to recent global occurrences.
In the winter of 1953, hurricane-driven flood waters rushing in from the North Sea destroyed dikes and obliterated an entire province in the southwestern Netherlands—a territory which “lay embedded between two arms of the sea that did what arms usually do: they move.” De Moor observes this disaster from the juxtaposed viewpoints of two sisters—young wife and mother Lidy and her virginal younger sibling Armanda. When Armanda offers to take Lidy’s two-year-old daughter Nadja to a party, in exchange for Lidy’s appearance at a similar event held for Armanda’s godchild—for the sisters resemble each other so closely, few people can tell them apart—they also exchange destinies. Lidy travels to the imminently endangered seaside town of Zierkezee, while Armanda becomes companion for the day to Nadja and her father (and Lidy’s husband) Sjoerd. De Moor’s laconic, precisely descriptive prose (memorably captured in Janeway’s pristine translation) pinpoints numerous indications of what is to come (e.g., the curious phenomenon of hares running alongside cars on a well-traveled highway) and what later occurs (e.g., the sighting of “a farmhouse that…no longer stood in the middle of fields or meadows but in an ocean current”). As Lidy’s ordeal, presented in piecemeal fragments of hard-won momentary stays against extinction, approaches its end, Armanda, Sjoerd and Nadja—both during the storm and for years afterward—grasp at whatever forms of enduring and persevering rise up before them. And de Moor brings this harrowing story to a stunning climax, as Armanda, an old woman kept alive by little more than her memories, in effect dreams a long conversation with the beloved sister whose life she has inadvertently appropriated and whose sufferings she has grown and learned to share.
It’s hard to resist using the word “symphonic” to describe this exquisitely composed, piercingly moving story. De Moor continues to scale increasingly impressive heights.Pub Date: March 12, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-307-26494-7
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Dec. 22, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2010
BOOK REVIEW
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
The writing is merely serviceable, and one can’t help but wish the author had found a way to present her material as...
An unlikely love story set amid the horrors of a Nazi death camp.
Based on real people and events, this debut novel follows Lale Sokolov, a young Slovakian Jew sent to Auschwitz in 1942. There, he assumes the heinous task of tattooing incoming Jewish prisoners with the dehumanizing numbers their SS captors use to identify them. When the Tätowierer, as he is called, meets fellow prisoner Gita Furman, 17, he is immediately smitten. Eventually, the attraction becomes mutual. Lale proves himself an operator, at once cagey and courageous: As the Tätowierer, he is granted special privileges and manages to smuggle food to starving prisoners. Through female prisoners who catalog the belongings confiscated from fellow inmates, Lale gains access to jewels, which he trades to a pair of local villagers for chocolate, medicine, and other items. Meanwhile, despite overwhelming odds, Lale and Gita are able to meet privately from time to time and become lovers. In 1944, just ahead of the arrival of Russian troops, Lale and Gita separately leave the concentration camp and experience harrowingly close calls. Suffice it to say they both survive. To her credit, the author doesn’t flinch from describing the depravity of the SS in Auschwitz and the unimaginable suffering of their victims—no gauzy evasions here, as in Boy in the Striped Pajamas. She also manages to raise, if not really explore, some trickier issues—the guilt of those Jews, like the tattooist, who survived by doing the Nazis’ bidding, in a sense betraying their fellow Jews; and the complicity of those non-Jews, like the Slovaks in Lale’s hometown, who failed to come to the aid of their beleaguered countrymen.
The writing is merely serviceable, and one can’t help but wish the author had found a way to present her material as nonfiction. Still, this is a powerful, gut-wrenching tale that is hard to shake off.Pub Date: Sept. 4, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-06-279715-5
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: July 16, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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