There’s a literary renaissance underway just north of us, and Crummey’s quite literally astonishing debut novel is one of...
A little-known historical atrocity—the extinction of the Beothuk (“Red”) Indians of central Newfoundland—becomes an authentic tragedy in this brilliantly constructed, immensely moving debut novel by an award-winning Canadian poet and short-story writer.
The narrative, which covers roughly the years 1811–20, is assembled from both the viewpoints and extended reminiscences of four characters: Indian-hating fisherman John Peyton and his less truculent son and namesake; their strong-minded, self-educated housekeeper Cassie Jure (who is also John Junior’s tutor); and David Buchan, the thoughtful British naval officer who is assigned to map the coastland, then Crown property, and also to investigate rumors “that attacks of inhuman barbarity were being perpetrated against the Indians by settlers.” The fate of the Beothuks is all the more powerfully communicated because Crummey’s text barely registers their presence (they’re virtual shadows passing into oblivion), concentrating the effects of the settlers’ treatment of them in the figure of “Mary,” a Beothuk woman abducted during a violent raid thereafter shrouded in defensive secrecy. Lieutenant Buchan’s painstaking reconstruction of a concealed history of theft (both Indians and settlers are, in their separate ways, “river thieves”) and murder is expertly juxtaposed with the several interconnected stories of the aforementioned major characters, each of whom exhibits thoroughly convincing heroic potential and unconquerable crucially damaging human failings. Furthermore, Crummey shifts the focus so skillfully that the reader’s attention and sympathies are seized by, and buffeted among, Cassie’s ferocious hunger for the full life so long denied her; David Buchan’s conflicted vacillations between duty and desire, sharpened by righteous anger; the elder John Peyton’s ego-driven need to hold onto all he has left; and the sense of opportunities lost so stunningly encapsulated in young John Peyton’s anguished final words: “All my life I’ve loved what didn’t belong to me.”
There’s a literary renaissance underway just north of us, and Crummey’s quite literally astonishing debut novel is one of the brightest jewels in its crown.Pub Date: June 19, 2002
ISBN: 0-618-14531-1
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2002
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
Coelho's placebo has racked up impressive sales in Brazil and Europe. Americans should flock to it like gulls.
Coelho is a Brazilian writer with four books to his credit. Following Diary of a Magus (1992—not reviewed) came this book, published in Brazil in 1988: it's an interdenominational, transcendental, inspirational fable—in other words, a bag of wind.
The story is about a youth empowered to follow his dream. Santiago is an Andalusian shepherd boy who learns through a dream of a treasure in the Egyptian pyramids. An old man, the king of Salem, the first of various spiritual guides, tells the boy that he has discovered his destiny: "to realize one's destiny is a person's only real obligation." So Santiago sells his sheep, sails to Tangier, is tricked out of his money, regains it through hard work, crosses the desert with a caravan, stops at an oasis long enough to fall in love, escapes from warring tribesmen by performing a miracle, reaches the pyramids, and eventually gets both the gold and the girl. Along the way he meets an Englishman who describes the Soul of the World; the desert woman Fatima, who teaches him the Language of the World; and an alchemist who says, "Listen to your heart" A message clings like ivy to every encounter; everyone, but everyone, has to put in their two cents' worth, from the crystal merchant to the camel driver ("concentrate always on the present, you'll be a happy man"). The absence of characterization and overall blandness suggest authorship by a committee of self-improvement pundits—a far cry from Saint- Exupery's The Little Prince: that flagship of the genre was a genuine charmer because it clearly derived from a quirky, individual sensibility.
Coelho's placebo has racked up impressive sales in Brazil and Europe. Americans should flock to it like gulls.Pub Date: July 1, 1993
ISBN: 0-06-250217-4
Page Count: 192
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1993
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
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