Ford brings an interesting, fictively personal outlook to one of the classics. Inspired and highly informed, The Ten...
Xenophon’s Anabasis provides the model for this epic first novel of Greek mercenaries stranded in the heart of the Persian empire during the late fifth century
When Xenophon composed the Anabasis he used the pseudonym Themistogenes of Syracuse, but here, Ford brings Themistogenes—Theo—to the foreground as narrator and protagonist. Xenophon’s lifelong companion, Theo is initially a slave, later a freedman, and now serving as aide-de-camp. It’s through Theo’s eyes that we see Xenophon’s growth from a rather delicate and pampered boy to the questioning young scholar who sits at the feet of Socrates, to the soldier of fortune. The main action takes place after Athens’ defeat by Sparta and the subsequent reign of the Thirty Tyrants. Xenophon is lured to the mercenary life, against his father’s wishes, by a cousin, Proxenus, who is in the command of Cyrus the Younger, half-brother to the Persian king Artaxerses and pretender to the Persian throne. When Cyrus is killed in battle, the entire Greek command, ten thousand strong, is left to fend for itself in hostile territory. Later, when the Greek commanders, including Proxenus, are treacherously murdered by the Persians, Xenophon leads them through Asia Minor and Armenia to the Black Sea. Having Theo narrate is a nice touch, as he can move freely through the army’s strata. His observations and comments are sharp, the way we have come to expect a person of his rank to behave in literature. With the exception of Socrates, he spares no one, and is pointedly critical of Thucydides, historian of the Peloponnesian War. The descriptive language throughout is heroic, at times echoing the Iliad.
Ford brings an interesting, fictively personal outlook to one of the classics. Inspired and highly informed, The Ten Thousand may lead many readers back to the original.Pub Date: June 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-312-26946-3
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Dunne/St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2001
Superbly translated, hypnotically written, a volume that requires and rewards slow, careful reading.
Another haunting mixture of history, memoir, and photo album from the author of The Rings of Saturn (1998) and Vertigo (2000).
Sebald’s fourth novel, like its predecessors, is a melancholy meditation on the dark side of human history. The unnamed narrator recounts the life story of Jacques Austerlitz, a polymath whose erudition, like the author’s, runs the gamut from his chosen field of architectural history to his avocation of zoology. Meeting by chance in the Antwerp railroad station, Austerlitz and the narrator fall easily into a learned conversation about the building itself that gradually leads to a discussion of the history and mysteries of Europe’s fortified cities. A friendship of sorts develops and the two meet from time to time, at first apparently without planning, to continue their chat as if no time had elapsed in between. Gradually, Austerlitz begins to reveal his personal history. In 1939, at the age of five, he was adopted and raised by an austere Welsh cleric and his equally forbidding wife. He knows nothing of his past until he is encouraged to explore history by an inspirational teacher. Eventually, Austerlitz discovers that he is a child of a Jewish couple who vanished in the Holocaust after sending him to England to escape—no surprise to those who are familiar with Sebald’s earlier work. Austerlitz recounts his story in a low-key, slow-moving, but utterly engrossing prose style, with almost no paragraph or chapter breaks, interrupted only by a series of eerie photographs of landscapes, architectural features, and hazily glimpsed faces. The tale is cunningly constructed around internal echoes, phrases repeated many pages apart, whose larger significance can be grasped only on repetition, and a complex, multilayered set of thematic correspondences that cannot be unraveled on a single reading.
Superbly translated, hypnotically written, a volume that requires and rewards slow, careful reading.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-375-50483-4
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2001
When you’re done binge-watching The Crown, pick up this multifaceted wartime thriller.
During German bombing raids on London during World War II, the young princesses Elizabeth and Margaret are secreted away to Ireland for protection.
Clonmillis Hall has seen better days. A large estate in rural Ireland belonging to the Duke of Edenmore, Clonmillis, by virtue of Ireland’s neutrality in the war, feels a world away from the bombs raining down on England. But during a secret meeting in Dublin, arrangements are made: King George’s two young daughters need to be kept safe during the Blitz, and remote Ireland seems the perfect place. The result is a series of domestic and professional frictions of nationality, class, religion, and gender. There is Dick Lascelles, the louche, charismatic diplomat in charge of the arrangements. Detective Garda Strafford, whose Anglo-Irish background sets him somewhat apart from his countrymen, oversees the estate’s security. Special Agent Celia Nashe, posing as a governess, is caught between her professional duties and being a surrogate caretaker to the serious elder princess, code-named “Ellen,” and the fiery younger girl, “Mary.” There is the irascible Duke and his household staff, who have varying levels of knowledge of the plot, and then there are those outside the estate who would seek to undermine the safety of everyone on it. Black (the pen name of Booker Prize–winning novelist John Banville) continues his storied career in the same vein as his most recent novel, Wolf on a String (2017), a historical mystery set in Prague, though his return here to his native Ireland is a welcome one. As ever, Black’s gifts of rich description and deft characterization are on display, and if the first half of the novel is more leisurely than a typical political thriller, its second half positively gallops.
When you’re done binge-watching The Crown, pick up this multifaceted wartime thriller.Pub Date: Jan. 14, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-250-13301-4
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2019
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