A historically provocative and dramatically riveting tale.
A debut novel offers a literary reimagining of Jesus’ life and ministry from the perspectives of those who encounter him.
Darmud has no pretensions about his moral standing: “I knew I was a worm.” An incorrigible womanizer beset by greed, he establishes a prostitution ring in Alexandria, but his Uncle Alexander Lysimachus exiles Darmud when he discovers it. Alexander sends his nephew to Jerusalem to work for his friend Eleizer, a Pharisee and member of the powerful Sanhedrin. Eleizer tasks Darmud with vigilantly following Jesus, the “upstart Jewish teacher who thinks he’s a prophet.” The Sanhedrin fear that Jesus’ mounting popularity will be interpreted by the Roman authorities as the beginnings of a political insurgency and that they will tighten their control of the Jewish State as a result. Meanwhile, Mariamme of Sepphoris, a traveling tradeswoman, is falsely accused of adultery and dragged out into the streets of Jerusalem to be stoned to death. But Jesus intervenes and prevents the mob from satisfying its lust for violent punishment. She meets Darmud in Magdala, and the two become romantically involved, but he’s only interested in her as an instrument of carnal satisfaction and a potential source of information regarding Jesus. Later on, encouraged by her friend Nainah and servant, Amos, she attends some of Jesus’ sermons and becomes a devoted follower. But Judas Iscariot objects to her proximity to Jesus, especially after hearing the lascivious rumors Darmud spreads about her in an effort to sully her reputation. Harris chronicles Jesus’ ministry up until his resurrection, shifting deftly from one first-person narration to the next. Readers are treated to the impressions of a slave, a blind man granted his sight by Jesus, and notable biblical figures like Judas and Pontius Pilate, among others. The author’s dramatic interpretation of the New Testament is meticulously faithful to the historical record but also artistically inventive. She has a gift for the nuanced construction (and reconstruction) of authentic characters. Harris delicately depicts Judas’ internal struggle on the way to his betrayal of Jesus and the profound remorse he experiences when he realizes precisely what he’s engineered: “My heart stopped beating. At that moment I saw what would happen, and what I had done. I had brought it about. My cursed desire to please everyone, and to be everyone’s darling, my pride, my self-imposed isolation, my intellectual arrogance, my touchy dignity.” Darmud, too, is intriguingly cynical—while some see a savior in Jesus, he only perceives an “enigmatic, misleading, and slippery” con man, and he’s incapable of thinking otherwise: “I was out to find a sinister motive in Jesus and by damn I was going to find one.” The author allows herself some fantastical literary devices, which are powerfully employed, like the personification of fear and the “Powers of Darkness.” The entire novel reads like an espionage thriller and manages to unfurl with crackling suspense despite the conclusion’s being historically foregone. This is an exceedingly intelligent re-creation of a story so familiar such an authorial feat should not be possible.
A historically provocative and dramatically riveting tale.Pub Date: Oct. 27, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-4808-0991-8
Page Count: 244
Publisher: Archway Publishing
Review Posted Online: May 6, 2019
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
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
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