A modest book with heroic pretentions likely to appeal most to the Sedona/Santa Fe set.
What to make of a kid born with four ears? One thing’s for sure: he’s bound to listen.
Novelist/screenwriter Golding (Benjamin’s Gift, 1999, etc.) strains for significance and symbolic import with this yarn, a blend of fable and what Edward Said would surely call (and not as a compliment) orientalist fantasy, with The Other being strange and inscrutable but all-too-human for all that. With his four ears, “placed side by side, like pairs of matched seashells,” Nouri Ahmad Mohammad ibn Mahsoud al-Morad can’t help but be noticed for good and ill—and mostly for ill, since the superstitious inhabitants of his little village are naturally curious, and not in a complimentary way, about the kid. The hero has an unusual feature: check. The hero sets off on a heroic journey: check. The hero is misunderstood and feared: check. With a Joseph Campbell–worthy schematic, the kid heads off to the big city to find such fortunes as the djinns and deity will allow. Fortunately for the sage Nouri, he falls in with Sufis whose master sees in him the makings of a pretty cool dude. Followers with arcane knowledge: check, as Golding waxes encyclopedic: “Centered on the chanting of litanies and accompanied by the playing of music, the sema was deep at the heart of Sufi practice.” Sema-antics aside, Nouri undergoes all sorts of adventures in quest of—well, that’d be telling, but suffice it to say that there are fraught moments throughout (“the look on Vishpar’s face as the marauder ran him through was what remained in Nouri’s heart as they carried him away”). There’s a Life of Pi–ish tang to the whole enterprise, although, to his credit, Golding is the better writer, and he manages to avoid the worst of New Age treacliness. And, for whatever reason, there’s lots of good eating throughout, complete with a glossary of food terms. For what hero wants to go hungry?
A modest book with heroic pretentions likely to appeal most to the Sedona/Santa Fe set.Pub Date: Oct. 6, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-250-07128-6
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Picador
Review Posted Online: July 14, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
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
Too beholden to sentimentality and cliché, this novel fails to establish a uniquely realized perspective.
Hunter’s debut novel tracks the experiences of her family members during the Holocaust.
Sol and Nechuma Kurc, wealthy, cultured Jews in Radom, Poland, are successful shop owners; they and their grown children live a comfortable lifestyle. But that lifestyle is no protection against the onslaught of the Holocaust, which eventually scatters the members of the Kurc family among several continents. Genek, the oldest son, is exiled with his wife to a Siberian gulag. Halina, youngest of all the children, works to protect her family alongside her resistance-fighter husband. Addy, middle child, a composer and engineer before the war breaks out, leaves Europe on one of the last passenger ships, ending up thousands of miles away. Then, too, there are Mila and Felicia, Jakob and Bella, each with their own share of struggles—pain endured, horrors witnessed. Hunter conducted extensive research after learning that her grandfather (Addy in the book) survived the Holocaust. The research shows: her novel is thorough and precise in its details. It’s less precise in its language, however, which frequently relies on cliché. “You’ll get only one shot at this,” Halina thinks, enacting a plan to save her husband. “Don’t botch it.” Later, Genek, confronting a routine bit of paperwork, must decide whether or not to hide his Jewishness. “That form is a deal breaker,” he tells himself. “It’s life and death.” And: “They are low, it seems, on good fortune. And something tells him they’ll need it.” Worse than these stale phrases, though, are the moments when Hunter’s writing is entirely inadequate for the subject matter at hand. Genek, describing the gulag, calls the nearest town “a total shitscape.” This is a low point for Hunter’s writing; elsewhere in the novel, it’s stronger. Still, the characters remain flat and unknowable, while the novel itself is predictable. At this point, more than half a century’s worth of fiction and film has been inspired by the Holocaust—a weighty and imposing tradition. Hunter, it seems, hasn’t been able to break free from her dependence on it.
Too beholden to sentimentality and cliché, this novel fails to establish a uniquely realized perspective.Pub Date: Feb. 14, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-399-56308-9
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: Nov. 21, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2016
BOOK TO SCREEN
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