On balance, more a vivid portrait than gripping narrative.
First-time Iranian author Baharloo (Houston, Texas–based) depicts the harried life of an indentured servant to a once-powerful family who lose everything as Iran’s rulers assert their will.
Spanning the seminal years from 1928 to 1981, the story begins with the birth of Sarveali in 1928. Soon an orphan, Sarveali, a runt of a boy, is indentured by his uncle Barat-Ali at the age of six to the Great Khan of the Shirlu dynasty. Barat-Ali is greedy, unscrupulous, and abusive, not only insisting that Sarveali’s wages be paid to him, but also raping him before depositing him at the Khans’ great estate in the mountains. There, Sarveali becomes the servant of the Khans’ second son, Teimour, a moody and handsome lad to whom Sarveali is soon passionately attached. The estate, which Baharloo luminously describes, is still run on feudal lines: there are zebra hunts, feasts, and the making of the famous quince preserves after first extracting the seeds. The Khans are all powerful and prodigal in their appetites, but Iran is changing, and the old ways are doomed. In the 1940s, when Reza Shah organizes a military attack on all the Khans, Sarveali’s Khan is arrested and dies in prison, the property is ransacked, and eldest son Changiz becomes head of the family. The Khans enjoy a brief reprieve after Reza Shah is deposed, but Reza Shah’s son, who succeeds him, implements land reforms that drastically reduce their land-holdings. As the Khans’ fortunes decline and Teimour moves abroad, Sarveali is forced to marry his cousin Yazgulu, but, in love with Teimour, he’s unable to consummate his marriage. Ashamed of his impotence and angered by Yazgulu’s flagrant adulteries, he kills her in a drunken rage. In prison, he becomes an opium addict, but the Khans need him, and, released from prison, he remains loyal as the Shah is succeeded by the Mullahs, and Teimour comes home to die.
On balance, more a vivid portrait than gripping narrative.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2004
ISBN: 1-882593-87-1
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Bridge Works
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2004
A first novel, this is also a first person account of Scout's (Jean Louise) recall of the years that led to the ending of a mystery, the breaking of her brother Jem's elbow, the death of her father's enemy — and the close of childhood years. A widower, Atticus raises his children with legal dispassion and paternal intelligence, and is ably abetted by Calpurnia, the colored cook, while the Alabama town of Maycomb, in the 1930's, remains aloof to their divergence from its tribal patterns. Scout and Jem, with their summer-time companion, Dill, find their paths free from interference — but not from dangers; their curiosity about the imprisoned Boo, whose miserable past is incorporated in their play, results in a tentative friendliness; their fears of Atticus' lack of distinction is dissipated when he shoots a mad dog; his defense of a Negro accused of raping a white girl, Mayella Ewell, is followed with avid interest and turns the rabble whites against him. Scout is the means of averting an attack on Atticus but when he loses the case it is Boo who saves Jem and Scout by killing Mayella's father when he attempts to murder them. The shadows of a beginning for black-white understanding, the persistent fight that Scout carries on against school, Jem's emergence into adulthood, Calpurnia's quiet power, and all the incidents touching on the children's "growing outward" have an attractive starchiness that keeps this southern picture pert and provocative. There is much advance interest in this book; it has been selected by the Literary Guild and Reader's Digest; it should win many friends.
Pub Date: July 11, 1960
ISBN: 0060935464
Page Count: 323
Publisher: Lippincott
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1960
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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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