Unconvincing.
This prolix thriller, the Spanish author’s first English translation, substitutes Dante’s poetry for Leonardo’s painting as the basis for a plodding tale of byzantine intrigue.
Dr. Ottavia Salina is Super Nun. Helming the Vatican’s Secret Archive, she’s a world-renowned paleographer, master of dozens of dead languages, a sharp-tongued feminist and the darling daughter of a teeming famiglia straight out of mob-movie central casting. Asensi has given us, in fact, an ecclesiastical Jane Bond whose mission is to decipher the elaborate scarification on the corpse of an Ethiopian accused of mysterious, heinous crimes against the Church—seven kinds of crosses decorate his flesh and a Greek “sigma” is imprinted on his skull. Globetrotting in company with a hunky, brainiac Swiss Guard and an obligatorily eccentric archaeologist, Salina uncovers a secret society called The Staurofilakes. Headed by the Cato, a kind of heretical Darth Vader, the subterranean order has stirred the pope’s ire by stealing the holiest of relics—bits of the True Cross upon which Jesus was crucified. Further, elaborate skullduggery is required before Salina and crew finally happen upon a key to tracking down the Cato: the Purgatorio of Dante’s Divine Comedy. As readers wind through the maze of Asensi’s plot, they may find riveting her detailed reviews of early church history, of crucifix lore and of Vatican politics. Indeed, such arcana is one of the novel’s strengths. But paper-thin characterization, clunky prose, unnecessary footnotes (in a whodunit, no less), an unconvincing romance and, after a while, a tedious reading of Dante’s spiritual classic as an extended game of Clue, seriously compromise this tale.
Unconvincing.Pub Date: April 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-082857-9
Page Count: 480
Publisher: Rayo/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2006
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
BOOK TO SCREEN
These letters from some important executive Down Below, to one of the junior devils here on earth, whose job is to corrupt mortals, are witty and written in a breezy style seldom found in religious literature. The author quotes Luther, who said: "The best way to drive out the devil, if he will not yield to texts of Scripture, is to jeer and flout him, for he cannot bear scorn." This the author does most successfully, for by presenting some of our modern and not-so-modern beliefs as emanating from the devil's headquarters, he succeeds in making his reader feel like an ass for ever having believed in such ideas. This kind of presentation gives the author a tremendous advantage over the reader, however, for the more timid reader may feel a sense of guilt after putting down this book. It is a clever book, and for the clever reader, rather than the too-earnest soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1942
ISBN: 0060652934
Page Count: 53
Publisher: Macmillan
Review Posted Online: Oct. 17, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1943
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