A masterwork of modern European letters that should earn the author a wide readership outside his homeland.
Vast, generous-spirited story of family across the face of the 20th century in the turbulent Balkans.
“Around the subject of my elder uncle there was silence.” So writes the prolific Bosnia-born Croatian journalist, novelist, and poet Jergović at the beginning of this epic. That silence, born of an accident of history and bloodlines, surrounds much of his family in this blend of memoir and fiction. (It is seldom clear where fact shades into invention.) The uncle’s maternal grandfather, Jergović’s great-grandfather, was an ethnic German who spoke only German to his children, and although his Croatian and Slovene sons-in-law spoke German fluently, he spoke to them only in their languages. Fastidious about his Germanness and the difference of others, that great-grandfather nonetheless stood alongside Jews, Turks, Croatians, Hungarians, Bulgarians, and all the other diverse people who made up the population of Sarajevo; during World War II, when those ethnic distinctions were made matters of life and death, he sheltered his neighbors from the Croatian fascists, the Ustaše, “not primarily because he was a good and unselfish man, but because they were an important part of his own world.” In short, Opapa couldn’t imagine a monocultural life. Jergović himself, old enough to remember life in socialist Yugoslavia before it splintered in civil war, recounts being breastfed at birth by “an unknown Muslim woman,” further evidence of universality in a time of ethnic hatred. Jergović’s pages are peppered with walk-ons from Bosnian, Serbian, and Croatian history, such as a feared interrogator who, after retiring, “had a small house with a large garden full of roses, which he cared for himself, breeding some and buying others from various parts of the world.” Even monsters, it seems, are susceptible to beauty. There is beauty aplenty, and ample monstrosity, in Jergović’s account, as well as many moments of mystery: a beekeeper’s coded journal, the alpenglow that surrounds Sarajevo as surely as a besieging army, the “living torment” that is existence, all come under Jergović’s empathetic eye.
A masterwork of modern European letters that should earn the author a wide readership outside his homeland.Pub Date: June 15, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-939810-52-6
Page Count: 500
Publisher: Archipelago
Review Posted Online: Feb. 9, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2021
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
Uneven but fitfully amusing.
Betrayed by her husband, a severely depressed young woman gets drawn into the over-the-top festivities at a lavish wedding.
Phoebe Stone, who teaches English literature at a St. Louis college, is plotting her own demise. Her husband, Matt, has left her for another woman, and Phoebe is taking it hard. Indeed, she's determined just where and how she will end it all: at an oceanfront hotel in Newport, where she will lie on a king-sized canopy bed and take a bottle of her cat’s painkillers. At the hotel, Phoebe meets bride-to-be Lila, a headstrong rich girl presiding over her own extravagant six-day wedding celebration. Lila thought she had booked every room in the hotel, and learning of Phoebe's suicidal intentions, she forbids this stray guest from disrupting the nuptials: “No. You definitely can’t kill yourself. This is my wedding week.” After the punchy opening, a grim flashback to the meltdown of Phoebe's marriage temporarily darkens the mood, but things pick up when spoiled Lila interrupts Phoebe's preparations and sweeps her up in the wedding juggernaut. The slide from earnest drama to broad farce is somewhat jarring, but from this point on, Espach crafts an enjoyable—if overstuffed—comedy of manners. When the original maid of honor drops out, Phoebe is persuaded, against her better judgment, to take her place. There’s some fun to be had here: The wedding party—including groom-to-be Gary, a widower, and his 11-year-old daughter—takes surfing lessons; the women in the group have a session with a Sex Woman. But it all goes on too long, and the humor can seem forced, reaching a low point when someone has sex with the vintage wedding car (you don’t want to know the details). Later, when two characters have a meet-cute in a hot tub, readers will guess exactly how the marriage plot resolves.
Uneven but fitfully amusing.Pub Date: July 30, 2024
ISBN: 9781250899576
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: Sept. 13, 2024
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
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