A promising story hobbled by the known facts.
A scholar investigates the medieval passion of Heloise and Abelard and gleans insight into his own romantic woes in the latest by British broadcaster and author Bragg (In Our Time: Celebrating Twenty Years of Essential Conversation, 2018, etc.).
Peter Abelard is a nobleman who gave up his birthright to lecture in philosophy, and Heloise is the well-educated niece and ward of high ranking Parisian cleric Canon Fulbert. (Bragg posits that Fulbert, who honors celibacy only in the breach, is actually Heloise’s father.) It may be unclear to modern readers why these iconic lovers were considered so transgressive long before each took holy orders: She is in her mid-20s and he is in his mid-30s, and the main impediment to their marriage—besides Heloise’s own fierce independence—is the fact that Abelard teaches at the Cathedral School of Notre Dame, where his self-imposed chastity has enhanced his reputation as a cerebral ascetic. In a metafictional frame story, Arthur, a British professor, is in the Latin Quarter writing a novel about the pair with the help of his daughter, Julia, who also hopes to extract the real reason for her parents’ estrangement. Abelard is hired by Fulbert to tutor Heloise, and the two fall helplessly in love and lust. When Heloise becomes pregnant, Fulbert beats her, and Abelard spirits her away to his ancestral Brittany, where she gives birth to their son, Astralabe. From there, the 12th-century European mores motivating what follows are tangled indeed. Suffice it to say that the couple’s attempts to mollify Fulbert—including a secret marriage—fail spectacularly: His hirelings drug and castrate Abelard. Thenceforth it’s the monastery for him, the convent for her—correspondence and one distant encounter will be their only congress. The biggest narrative challenge is historical reality: All the drama is front-loaded into a short time span. For the next few decades this notorious liaison plays out (in history) only in letters and (in the novel) thoughts, extrapolated from the letters. This approach muffles the sad plights of two brilliant people who were, essentially, punished for having too good a time. And the moral for Arthur’s marriage is less than profound.
A promising story hobbled by the known facts.Pub Date: Nov. 5, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-948924-80-1
Page Count: 312
Publisher: Arcade
Review Posted Online: Aug. 18, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 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
Miller makes Homer pertinent to women facing 21st-century monsters.
A retelling of ancient Greek lore gives exhilarating voice to a witch.
“Monsters are a boon for gods. Imagine all the prayers.” So says Circe, a sly, petulant, and finally commanding voice that narrates the entirety of Miller’s dazzling second novel. The writer returns to Homer, the wellspring that led her to an Orange Prize for The Song of Achilles (2012). This time, she dips into The Odyssey for the legend of Circe, a nymph who turns Odysseus’ crew of men into pigs. The novel, with its distinctive feminist tang, starts with the sentence: “When I was born, the name for what I was did not exist.” Readers will relish following the puzzle of this unpromising daughter of the sun god Helios and his wife, Perse, who had negligible use for their child. It takes banishment to the island Aeaea for Circe to sense her calling as a sorceress: “I will not be like a bird bred in a cage, I thought, too dull to fly even when the door stands open. I stepped into those woods and my life began.” This lonely, scorned figure learns herbs and potions, surrounds herself with lions, and, in a heart-stopping chapter, outwits the monster Scylla to propel Daedalus and his boat to safety. She makes lovers of Hermes and then two mortal men. She midwifes the birth of the Minotaur on Crete and performs her own C-section. And as she grows in power, she muses that “not even Odysseus could talk his way past [her] witchcraft. He had talked his way past the witch instead.” Circe’s fascination with mortals becomes the book’s marrow and delivers its thrilling ending. All the while, the supernatural sits intriguingly alongside “the tonic of ordinary things.” A few passages coil toward melodrama, and one inelegant line after a rape seems jarringly modern, but the spell holds fast. Expect Miller’s readership to mushroom like one of Circe’s spells.
Miller makes Homer pertinent to women facing 21st-century monsters.Pub Date: April 10, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-316-55634-7
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Jan. 22, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2018
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