With Ilse as unblinking guide, Charlesworth travels the morally ambiguous alleyways of war to create a deeply satisfying if...
More Empire of the Sun than The Painted Bird, British author Charlesworth’s fourth (Glass House, 1987, etc.), based on her mother’s history, follows a half-Jewish German girl’s travails during WWII after her mother’s arrangements for her to leave Germany go awry.
It’s 1939 when Ilse arrives in Morocco to stay with her uncle Willie. Her father Otto, a Jewish Communist, has stayed in Germany on principle to resist the Nazis while Ilse’s mother Lore is supposedly saving money for her own passage. When Willie joins the French Foreign Legion to fight Hitler, Ilse is sent to Paris, expecting to find both parents. Only Otto shows up. Lore doesn't come. Instead, sending papers that erase Ilse’s Jewish heritage, she asks the girl to return to Germany, where, as an Aryan, she will now supposedly be safe. Otto feels betrayed by Lore, who used Ilse to get him to leave Germany for his own safety. Ilse is torn between loyal obedience to her father, whose lack of past attention she resents, and yearning for her mother, whose maternal love she never doubts. Ultimately, Ilse stays with Otto. As Paris falls, they make their way south, helped along the way by the romantic if shadowy resistance fighter Francois, a Polish Jew whose personal mission becomes keeping Ilse safe over the next four years. Ilse and Otto end up in Marseilles, where a well-connected madam protects them—until the Germans capture Otto. Ilse’s ambivalence toward her father, a hero in the eyes of the world but a man riddled with human imperfection, is particularly moving. Meanwhile, during the bombing of Hamburg, Lore dies while saving her employer’s son, a Hitler Youth member who secretly performs small acts of anti-fascism. Ilse grows from a passive child, observing events, into an active participant, driven by the same mixed motives as everyone else.
With Ilse as unblinking guide, Charlesworth travels the morally ambiguous alleyways of war to create a deeply satisfying if unsettling read full of richly complicated characters.Pub Date: Sept. 12, 2004
ISBN: 1-4000-4009-4
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2004
Britisher Swift's sixth novel (Ever After, 1992 etc.) and fourth to appear here is a slow-to-start but then captivating tale of English working-class families in the four decades following WW II. When Jack Dodds dies suddenly of cancer after years of running a butcher shop in London, he leaves a strange request—namely, that his ashes be scattered off Margate pier into the sea. And who could better be suited to fulfill this wish than his three oldest drinking buddies—insurance man Ray, vegetable seller Lenny, and undertaker Vic, all of whom, like Jack himself, fought also as soldiers or sailors in the long-ago world war. Swift's narrative start, with its potential for the melodramatic, is developed instead with an economy, heart, and eye that release (through the characters' own voices, one after another) the story's humanity and depth instead of its schmaltz. The jokes may be weak and self- conscious when the three old friends meet at their local pub in the company of the urn holding Jack's ashes; but once the group gets on the road, in an expensive car driven by Jack's adoptive son, Vince, the story starts gradually to move forward, cohere, and deepen. The reader learns in time why it is that no wife comes along, why three marriages out of three broke apart, and why Vince always hated his stepfather Jack and still does—or so he thinks. There will be stories of innocent youth, suffering wives, early loves, lost daughters, secret affairs, and old antagonisms—including a fistfight over the dead on an English hilltop, and a strewing of Jack's ashes into roiling seawaves that will draw up feelings perhaps unexpectedly strong. Without affectation, Swift listens closely to the lives that are his subject and creates a songbook of voices part lyric, part epic, part working-class social realism—with, in all, the ring to it of the honest, human, and true.
Pub Date: April 5, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-41224-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 1996
Not as thematically ambitious as Whitehead’s earlier work, but a whole lot of fun to read.
Another surprise from an author who never writes the same novel twice.
Though Whitehead has earned considerable critical acclaim for his earlier work—in particular his debut (The Intuitionist, 1999) and its successor (John Henry Days, 2001)—he’ll likely reach a wider readership with his warmest novel to date. Funniest as well, though there have been flashes of humor throughout his writing. The author blurs the line between fiction and memoir as he recounts the coming-of-age summer of 15-year-old Benji Cooper in the family’s summer retreat of New York’s Sag Harbor. “According to the world, we were the definition of paradox: black boys with beach houses,” writes Whitehead. Caucasians are only an occasional curiosity within this idyll, and parents are mostly absent as well. Each chapter is pretty much a self-contained entity, corresponding to a rite of passage: getting the first job, negotiating the mysteries of the opposite sex. There’s an accident with a BB gun and plenty of episodes of convincing someone older to buy beer, but not much really happens during this particular summer. Yet by the end of it, Benji is well on his way to becoming Ben, and he realizes that he is a different person than when the summer started. He also realizes that this time in his life will eventually live only in memory. There might be some distinctions between Benji and Whitehead, though the novelist also spent his youthful summers in Sag Harbor and was the same age as Benji in 1985, when the novel is set. Yet the first-person narrator has the novelist’s eye for detail, craft of character development and analytical instincts for sharp social commentary.
Not as thematically ambitious as Whitehead’s earlier work, but a whole lot of fun to read.Pub Date: April 28, 2009
ISBN: 978-0-385-52765-1
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2009
BOOK TO SCREEN
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