Literary history blends masterfully with a plot of intrigue in this slim and delightful novel.
A novel from the point of view of Henry James’ fictional amanuensis.
It’s 1907, and Frieda Wroth, a young woman from a small English town, has recently completed a course in typewriting, a skill that promises to liberate women by preparing them for employment. Frieda’s prospects seem even brighter when she’s hired by the celebrated author Henry James to take dictation. But certain ironies soon become evident, the most vivid of which is that the role of the typist, despite those early hints at liberation, is an essentially passive one: as James dictates, Frieda types. During her free time, Frieda makes her own little forays into novel writing, forays that bear the unmistakable stamp of James’ influence. But then a guest comes to visit her employer, and Frieda’s world shifts its scope. Morton Fullerton is a charming, mysterious, and handsome American living in Paris. He catches Frieda’s eye, or she catches his, or both; in any case, it isn’t long before Fullerton has asked Frieda to retrieve for him certain compromising letters he’s sent, over the years, to Henry James. In other words, he’d like her to steal. If Heyns, an accomplished South African scholar, translator, and writer, relies a bit too often on too-convenient coincidence, that’s a forgivable sin. So, too, is the matter of his prose style, which, though elegant for the most part, occasionally, like Frieda’s, collapses beneath the weight of James’ influence. But his novel plays on a fascinating interchange among the idea of taking dictation, the role of a medium, the concepts of telepathy and thought transference (much in vogue at the time), and the role of the writer who, not unlike a medium, merely gives voice to those who speak through him. Then there are the cameos by real-life, but larger-than-life, personages like Edith Wharton, which are amusing but also convincing: Wharton, like James in this novel, comes to life as a full-fledged character.
Literary history blends masterfully with a plot of intrigue in this slim and delightful novel.Pub Date: Feb. 28, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-250-11900-1
Page Count: 288
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Dec. 5, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2016
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
Miller makes Homer pertinent to women facing 21st-century monsters.
A retelling of ancient Greek lore gives exhilarating voice to a witch.
“Monsters are a boon for gods. Imagine all the prayers.” So says Circe, a sly, petulant, and finally commanding voice that narrates the entirety of Miller’s dazzling second novel. The writer returns to Homer, the wellspring that led her to an Orange Prize for The Song of Achilles (2012). This time, she dips into The Odyssey for the legend of Circe, a nymph who turns Odysseus’ crew of men into pigs. The novel, with its distinctive feminist tang, starts with the sentence: “When I was born, the name for what I was did not exist.” Readers will relish following the puzzle of this unpromising daughter of the sun god Helios and his wife, Perse, who had negligible use for their child. It takes banishment to the island Aeaea for Circe to sense her calling as a sorceress: “I will not be like a bird bred in a cage, I thought, too dull to fly even when the door stands open. I stepped into those woods and my life began.” This lonely, scorned figure learns herbs and potions, surrounds herself with lions, and, in a heart-stopping chapter, outwits the monster Scylla to propel Daedalus and his boat to safety. She makes lovers of Hermes and then two mortal men. She midwifes the birth of the Minotaur on Crete and performs her own C-section. And as she grows in power, she muses that “not even Odysseus could talk his way past [her] witchcraft. He had talked his way past the witch instead.” Circe’s fascination with mortals becomes the book’s marrow and delivers its thrilling ending. All the while, the supernatural sits intriguingly alongside “the tonic of ordinary things.” A few passages coil toward melodrama, and one inelegant line after a rape seems jarringly modern, but the spell holds fast. Expect Miller’s readership to mushroom like one of Circe’s spells.
Miller makes Homer pertinent to women facing 21st-century monsters.Pub Date: April 10, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-316-55634-7
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Jan. 22, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2018
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