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
BOOK TO SCREEN
Entertaining and thoroughly engrossing.
Another reboot of Jane Austen?!? Hadlow pulls it off in a smart, heartfelt novel devoted to bookish Mary, middle of the five sisters in Pride and Prejudice.
Part 1 recaps Pride and Prejudice through Mary’s eyes, climaxing with the humiliating moment when she sings poorly at a party and older sister Elizabeth goads their father to cut her off in front of everyone. The sisters’ friend Charlotte, who marries the unctuous Mr. Collins after Elizabeth rejects him, emerges as a pivotal character; her conversations with Mary are even tougher-minded here than those with Elizabeth depicted by Austen. In Part 2, two years later, Mary observes on a visit that Charlotte is deferential but remote with her husband; she forms an intellectual friendship with the neglected and surprisingly nice Mr. Collins that leads to Charlotte’s asking Mary to leave. In Part 3, Mary finds refuge in London with her kindly aunt and uncle, Mr. and Mrs. Gardiner. Mrs. Gardiner is the second motherly woman, after Longbourn housekeeper Mrs. Hill, to try to undo the psychic damage wrought by Mary’s actual mother, shallow, status-obsessed Mrs. Bennet, by building up her confidence and buying her some nice clothes (funded by guilt-ridden Lizzy). Sure enough, two suitors appear: Tom Hayward, a poetry-loving lawyer who relishes Mary’s intellect but urges her to also express her feelings; and William Ryder, charming but feckless inheritor of a large fortune, whom naturally Mrs. Bennet loudly favors. It takes some maneuvering to orchestrate the estrangement of Mary and Tom, so clearly right for each other, but debut novelist Hadlow manages it with aplomb in a bravura passage describing a walking tour of the Lake District rife with seething complications furthered by odious Caroline Bingley. Her comeuppance at Mary’s hands marks the welcome final step in our heroine’s transformation from a self-doubting wallflower to a vibrant, self-assured woman who deserves her happy ending. Hadlow traces that progression with sensitivity, emotional clarity, and a quiet edge of social criticism Austen would have relished.
Entertaining and thoroughly engrossing.Pub Date: March 31, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-250-12941-3
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: Dec. 22, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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