“Please, somebody, please finish me”? So saith the potential reader, we prophesy.
Faber (stories: Vanilla Bright Like Eminem, 2007, etc.) takes on Prometheus.
In this revisionist romp, Faber reimagines the mortal who stole fire from the gods as Canadian linguist Theo Griepenkerl, who makes an amazing discovery when he’s sent to Iraq to help preserve war-threatened historical artifacts. When a bomb destroys a museum, nine dusty scrolls are discovered in a sculpture. They are quickly recognized by Theo (who, of course, reads Aramaic) as a “gospel” written by Malchus, servant to high priest Caiaphas and an eyewitness observer of Christ’s crucifixion. Returning to the West, Theo successfully markets his translation of Malchus’s gospel, which states, among other unholy particulars, that the Son of God’s actual last words were, “Please, somebody, please finish me.” The scholar’s subsequent adventures in the publishing world, juxtaposed with excerpts from the inflammatory gospel, include sexual bliss with an accommodating publisher’s rep, a harrowing experience on a dumbed-down TV talk show, amusing parodies of Amazon.com “reader reviews” (complete with misspellings and typos) and an agonizing reading at a Manhattan bookstore. In an easily foreseen climactic twist, Theo’s affront to the sensibilities of good Christian souls who perceive Satan in every sentence of dust-jacket hyperbole (plus some who’ve actually read the book) gets him kidnapped by a pill-popping white Muslim and a courtly Arab. Nothing else in the book matches its witty, impudent opening pages, as Faber pads like an insomniac housecat, stretching out every joke to the very edge of infinity.
“Please, somebody, please finish me”? So saith the potential reader, we prophesy.Pub Date: Jan. 1, 2009
ISBN: 978-1-84767-183-7
Page Count: 184
Publisher: Canongate
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2008
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
BOOK TO SCREEN
These letters from some important executive Down Below, to one of the junior devils here on earth, whose job is to corrupt mortals, are witty and written in a breezy style seldom found in religious literature. The author quotes Luther, who said: "The best way to drive out the devil, if he will not yield to texts of Scripture, is to jeer and flout him, for he cannot bear scorn." This the author does most successfully, for by presenting some of our modern and not-so-modern beliefs as emanating from the devil's headquarters, he succeeds in making his reader feel like an ass for ever having believed in such ideas. This kind of presentation gives the author a tremendous advantage over the reader, however, for the more timid reader may feel a sense of guilt after putting down this book. It is a clever book, and for the clever reader, rather than the too-earnest soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1942
ISBN: 0060652934
Page Count: 53
Publisher: Macmillan
Review Posted Online: Oct. 17, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1943
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