The nature of narrative itself would seem to be the focus here in a novel that challenges readers to connect the...
A labyrinthine narrative that wends its way through classical myth, Shakespearean theater, and childlike fairy tale as it twists toward a tentative contemporary conclusion.
British author Haddon has never written anything like the same book twice, but his fourth novel is in some ways even more audacious and ambitious than his breakthrough debut (The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, 2003). The plot propels itself forward at a furious clip, yet key characters disappear (and occasionally reappear) as the basic premise hopscotches centuries and countries. It begins with a bang, or rather a crash. A very rich man loses his very beautiful and pregnant wife when the small plane on which he never should have let her fly crashes into farmland, the pilot momentarily distracted by her beauty. A doctor who happens to be passing assists in the birth of her daughter, whose life begins as her mother’s ends. The forlorn father can find life’s only consolation in his daughter, named Angelica, and they share an incestuously secret life amid “the vapour of fantasy which always surrounds the rich, powerful and reclusive.” Angelica has some sense that these intimacies are wrong, a violation, but it is only with the arrival of the modern equivalent of a handsome prince that she feels she needs to escape; she needs this hero to rescue her, for, upon their first meeting, “she is already in thrall to an imagined future in which he takes her away from all this, and the knowledge that the fantasy is ridiculous does nothing to sour its addictive sweetness.” The attempted rescue almost results in a murder, but the prince himself escapes. At which point the story shifts to a different father and daughter, a king and a princess, who may well be an earlier incarnation of the same father and daughter. This tale has proven captivating since classical times and was popularly given form in the Shakespearean play Pericles. So Pericles becomes a character in this novel, as does Shakespeare, or perhaps his ghost. Pericles marries the princess and becomes a mourning father whose pregnant wife dies during an ill-advised voyage. Or did she die? The adventures of Pericles consume 14 years of the narrative, in which he grieves his wife and might have to save his own daughter. And Angelica? The novel ends with her yet seems to open into a whole new world.
The nature of narrative itself would seem to be the focus here in a novel that challenges readers to connect the multidimensional dots.Pub Date: June 18, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-385-54431-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: March 30, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2019
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
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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