The old, black magic just isn’t here. The Family is Godfather Lite. Eminently skippable.
The late (1920–99) Puzo’s last novel, completed by his companion Gino, is historical fiction, about the 15th-century Borgia clan—a book on which Puzo had worked sporadically since 1983.
The scattershot composition is all too obvious. Canned history predominates, and minimal dramatic action is more often summarized than portrayed. Nor are Puzo’s characters especially compelling, though the cast includes such notable late-Renaissance figures as Cardinal Rodrigo Borgia, first vice-chancellor (that is, consigliere) to Pope Innocent, then himself pontiff; the children this “son of the church” fathers on his various mistresses (such as infamous siblings Cesare and Lucrezia); and immortals like Niccolò Machiavelli, Michelangelo Buonarotti, and Leonardo da Vinci (the last of whom advises the military-minded Cesare on the construction of impregnable fortifications). The story is focused almost exclusively on shifting political alliances and the arranged marriages that create and sustain them—and machinations involving the royalty and nobility of Rome, Naples, France, and Spain tend quickly to blur together in the reader’s mind. Puzo and Gino inject some juice into the ongoing incestuous love between much-married Lucrezia and her vainglorious brother, but the latter is so preoccupied with conquering new territories (ostensibly for the glory of the church) that we soon lose interest in their fabled amorality. The fates of a Roman satirist who unwisely vilifies Cesare and of the radical Dominican friar Savonarola are promising subplots only very sketchily developed. Alas, all these gorgeously bedecked schemers aren’t anything like the charismatic monsters we expect (we know Vito and the other Corleones; Rodrigo Borgia and his brood are no Corleones). They’re number-crunching, publicity-conscious powerbrokers: a bunch of 15th-century Dick Cheneys.
The old, black magic just isn’t here. The Family is Godfather Lite. Eminently skippable.Pub Date: Oct. 2, 2001
ISBN: 0-06-039445-5
Page Count: 368
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2001
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
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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