A provocative take on an intriguing marriage.
This quasi-historical work views Vladimir Nabokov and his wife, Véra, at different points in their lives.
Zgustova, a Czech-born writer living in Spain, looks first at Vladimir in 1977 in Montreux, Switzerland, as his nimble mind dances among memories—boyhood in St. Petersburg, exile in Berlin—while struggling with his last novel and last illness. The third chapter focuses on a pivotal episode that is referred to throughout the book, Véra’s ultimatum in Cannes, 1937, as Vladimir’s lover, Irina Guadanini-Kokoshkin, visits the French resort to find out where she stands. Zgustova traces Véra’s thoughts and memories on a long, snowy drive to Boston in 1964 to rejoin her husband after seeing their son, Dmitri, perform with the Metropolitan Opera. The final section finds the widowed Véra in Montreux still tending to her husband’s work and thinking about how Irina got into some of his novels. The book, smoothly translated by Jones, ends with a bibliography of some 25 volumes. The meandering portrait of the couple features many real-life allusions and details that will be familiar to cognoscenti (with perhaps a few liberties taken). But it is Véra who emerges as Zgustova’s central figure, the person who often carries in her purse the gun in the title, although her main weapon is her will. Her Cannes ultimatum quashes Vladimir’s last great love, and she closely monitors her flirtatious genius thereafter. She insists on their leaving the U.S., a country he has come to love, and Dmitri says at one point that “keeping him in Montreux is her vendetta against him. She’s a Mafia boss.” Yet Stacy Schiff in the biography Véra (Mrs. Vladimir Nabokov): Portrait of a Marriage (1999) sees her shielding, controlling dominance as largely aimed at making it easier for him to write. Zgustova’s angle on Véra looks harshly black and white in areas where gray seems fairer.
A provocative take on an intriguing marriage.Pub Date: April 9, 2024
ISBN: 9781635423808
Page Count: 160
Publisher: Other Press
Review Posted Online: Jan. 20, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2024
BOOK REVIEW
An affecting portrait of a prickly woman.
A lifetime’s worth of letters combine to portray a singular character.
Sybil Van Antwerp, a cantankerous but exceedingly well-mannered septuagenarian, is the titular correspondent in Evans’ debut novel. Sybil has retired from a beloved job as chief clerk to a judge with whom she had previously been in private legal practice. She is the divorced mother of two living adult children and one who died when he was 8. She is a reader of novels, a gardener, and a keen observer of human nature. But the most distinguishing thing about Sybil is her lifelong practice of letter writing. As advancing vision problems threaten Sybil’s carefully constructed way of life—in which letters take the place of personal contact and engagement—she must reckon with unaddressed issues from her past that threaten the house of cards (letters, really) she has built around herself. Sybil’s relationships are gradually revealed in the series of letters sent to and received from, among others, her brother, sister-in-law, children, former work associates, and, intriguingly, literary icons including Joan Didion and Larry McMurtry. Perhaps most affecting is the series of missives Sybil writes but never mails to a shadowy figure from her past. Thoughtful musings on the value and immortal quality of letters and the written word populate one of Sybil’s notes to a young correspondent while other messages are laugh-out-loud funny, tinged with her characteristic blunt tartness. Evans has created a brusque and quirky yet endearing main character with no shortage of opinions and advice for others but who fails to excavate the knotty difficulties of her own life. As Sybil grows into a delayed self-awareness, her letters serve as a chronicle of fitful growth.
An affecting portrait of a prickly woman.Pub Date: May 6, 2025
ISBN: 9780593798430
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Feb. 15, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2025
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
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