One of Delbanco’s most attractive and accessible books.
Delbanco’s elegiac and elegant 13th novel (Old Scores, 1997) gathers the voices of a family of German emigrant Jews to describe their “escapes” (to London, then America) from Hitler’s persecution, and their mourning for the high culture betrayed and destroyed by the Nazi regime.
The family’s stories are framed by scenes set in 1996, during primary narrator (Americanized) Benjamin’s return, in middle age, to England for a visit with his dapper Uncle Gustave, an art dealer and enthusiast sustained on into old age by his love of beautiful things (years earlier, describing a purchase, Gustave had observed that “In a world . . . so full of willed barbarity, it is important that a picture with a shepherd be acquired and a claim be lodged for lastingness”). Other voices, speaking during the years 1944–64, include those of the young Benjamin and his older brother Jacob, growing up during the Blitz and amid muttered references to “Schicklgruber . . . the devil incarnate.” Delbanco creates telling indirect characterizations of their father Karl, a would-be artist who settled for becoming the dutiful son (unlike his brother Gustave) and went into business, eventually prospering (as owner of a “bristle factory”); and their neurasthenic mother Julia, embittered by the loss of the scholarly career she had sought in Germany, and by the (gratuitous and utterly false) suspicion that her husband is anything but a model of fidelity and decency. The best character here, however, is haughty “Granny” Elsa, kept alive by the wisdom of her beloved Boethius’s Consolations [sic] of Philosophy and memories of her late husband, taken by cancer before the Nazis could take him. These portraits and reminiscences are episodic, and to some degree static, but What Remains is often very moving, especially for its precise discriminations between going beyond what was lost and embracing “what remains” (in a resonant phrase ingeniously adapted from Ezra Pound).
One of Delbanco’s most attractive and accessible books.Pub Date: Nov. 22, 2000
ISBN: 0-446-52416-6
Page Count: 192
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2000
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
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
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