From inauspicious beginnings, Smedley is destined for greatness. Born in Missouri in 1892 and raised in the coal camps of...
Lee (Limestone Wall, 2014, etc.) recounts the story of forgotten radical Agnes Smedley in this historical novel.
From inauspicious beginnings, Smedley is destined for greatness. Born in Missouri in 1892 and raised in the coal camps of Colorado, she becomes acutely aware of the economic disparity that determines so much of what a person can expect from life. After much traveling around the American Southwest, she enrolls in college in Tempe, Arizona, where she meets a woman who encourages her to pursue journalism as a mechanism of political change. “What sort of political work?” asks Smedley. “Help the working class overthrow the capitalists,” replies the woman. “Women’s emancipation. Birth control....Bring about a socialist world.” So begins Smedley’s globe-trotting career as a journalist and activist, a life that involves assisting the plots of Indian nationalists, getting imprisoned in The Tombs in New York under the Espionage Act, and making love to a spymaster only feet from a wastebasket containing a decapitated human head. Interspersed between the chapters covering her younger life are those of an adult Smedley living in a cave among the loessial hills of China, covering the defeated Red Army in its camp at Yan’an. As a journalist, she interviews Cmdr. Zhu De and brings news of the Communist forces to the rest of the world. The two strains eventually catch up with each other and intertwine, as Smedley witnesses the marriage of her politics and her purpose in life as well as all the trouble those things can cause. Lee’s prose is smooth, and her account of Smedley’s evolution is sympathetic and colorful (during an attack on Shanghai in 1931, Smedley, armed with her notebook and pencil, “walked and ran with Chinese families as they evacuated, lane by lane, just ahead of the Japanese. In the background, bombs, gunfire, and sirens shook the city”). The author adeptly creates scenes that highlight the surreal miscellany of her subject’s life, as when Mao Zedong assists Smedley in ridding her cave of rats. The narration turns overly expositional at times, and a reader occasionally might have preferred to linger in various moments longer. But the book succeeds in illustrating the messiness of the early 20th century, when Smedley becomes simply one person among many attempting to fix the world with little more than her pen and her will.Pub Date: April 1, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-910688-00-7
Page Count: 340
Publisher: Holland House
Review Posted Online: March 7, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2016
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
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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