Eve is a natural storyteller; too bad the paint-by-numbers ending undermines her riveting portrait of the lost culture of...
Eve (The Family Orchard, 2000) re-creates the exotic, unfamiliar world of Yemen’s complex Jewish community from the 1920s through its wholesale exodus to Israel in 1949-50 through one young woman’s eyes.
The Damari family lives in Qaraah, a small Northern Yemen village, where their loving but sickly father owns a leather shop. In 1923, the local enforcer of the Orphans Decree—an actual law that allowed Muslims to forcibly remove and adopt fatherless Jewish children—shows particular interest in 5-year-old Adela Damari. Given her father’s precarious health, Adela grows up under a cloud of fear. The only way to avoid adoption is to become betrothed, a common-enough event for children in her culture. Unfortunately, Adela’s fiances keep dying, one of several bits of semimagical realism in the novel. Finally, thanks to her tough-minded mother’s trickery, Adela finds herself engaged at age 8 to her first cousin Asaf, recently arrived with his spice-merchant father from India. Their childhood romance progresses until Asaf must leave Qaraah with his father. Not yet in puberty, Adela pines for him, but her life changes dramatically in 1930 when another uncle moves to Qaraah with his wife, Rahel, a healer and gifted henna dyer—who knew henna was important in Eastern Jewish culture?—and their daughter, Hani. Despite her tradition-bound mother’s disapproval and distrust, Adela is immediately drawn to her sophisticated, imaginative and warmhearted relatives. Hani, who teaches her to read, becomes Adela’s most trusted friend. Rahel teaches her the art of henna. But happiness shatters in 1933 when drought and illness strike. Adela, now a young woman of 15, flees with Hani’s family to British-controlled Aden. Asaf reappears in their lives the next year. Suddenly the novel switches gears: Leisurely, slightly mystical, bittersweet reminiscence gives way to rushed melodrama as betrayal and sexuality mix under the long shadow of World War II.
Eve is a natural storyteller; too bad the paint-by-numbers ending undermines her riveting portrait of the lost culture of Yemeni Jews.Pub Date: Aug. 12, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-4767-4027-0
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: June 4, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2014
BOOK REVIEW
Too beholden to sentimentality and cliché, this novel fails to establish a uniquely realized perspective.
Hunter’s debut novel tracks the experiences of her family members during the Holocaust.
Sol and Nechuma Kurc, wealthy, cultured Jews in Radom, Poland, are successful shop owners; they and their grown children live a comfortable lifestyle. But that lifestyle is no protection against the onslaught of the Holocaust, which eventually scatters the members of the Kurc family among several continents. Genek, the oldest son, is exiled with his wife to a Siberian gulag. Halina, youngest of all the children, works to protect her family alongside her resistance-fighter husband. Addy, middle child, a composer and engineer before the war breaks out, leaves Europe on one of the last passenger ships, ending up thousands of miles away. Then, too, there are Mila and Felicia, Jakob and Bella, each with their own share of struggles—pain endured, horrors witnessed. Hunter conducted extensive research after learning that her grandfather (Addy in the book) survived the Holocaust. The research shows: her novel is thorough and precise in its details. It’s less precise in its language, however, which frequently relies on cliché. “You’ll get only one shot at this,” Halina thinks, enacting a plan to save her husband. “Don’t botch it.” Later, Genek, confronting a routine bit of paperwork, must decide whether or not to hide his Jewishness. “That form is a deal breaker,” he tells himself. “It’s life and death.” And: “They are low, it seems, on good fortune. And something tells him they’ll need it.” Worse than these stale phrases, though, are the moments when Hunter’s writing is entirely inadequate for the subject matter at hand. Genek, describing the gulag, calls the nearest town “a total shitscape.” This is a low point for Hunter’s writing; elsewhere in the novel, it’s stronger. Still, the characters remain flat and unknowable, while the novel itself is predictable. At this point, more than half a century’s worth of fiction and film has been inspired by the Holocaust—a weighty and imposing tradition. Hunter, it seems, hasn’t been able to break free from her dependence on it.
Too beholden to sentimentality and cliché, this novel fails to establish a uniquely realized perspective.Pub Date: Feb. 14, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-399-56308-9
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: Nov. 21, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2016
BOOK TO SCREEN
A deeply satisfying novel, both sensuously vivid and remarkably poignant.
Norwegian novelist Jacobsen folds a quietly powerful coming-of-age story into a rendition of daily life on one of Norway’s rural islands a hundred years ago in a novel that was shortlisted for the 2017 Man Booker International Prize.
Ingrid Barrøy, her father, Hans, mother, Maria, grandfather Martin, and slightly addled aunt Barbro are the owners and sole inhabitants of Barrøy Island, one of numerous small family-owned islands in an area of Norway barely touched by the outside world. The novel follows Ingrid from age 3 through a carefree early childhood of endless small chores, simple pleasures, and unquestioned familial love into her more ambivalent adolescence attending school off the island and becoming aware of the outside world, then finally into young womanhood when she must make difficult choices. Readers will share Ingrid’s adoration of her father, whose sense of responsibility conflicts with his romantic nature. He adores Maria, despite what he calls her “la-di-da” ways, and is devoted to Ingrid. Twice he finds work on the mainland for his sister, Barbro, but, afraid she’ll be unhappy, he brings her home both times. Rooted to the land where he farms and tied to the sea where he fishes, Hans struggles to maintain his family’s hardscrabble existence on an island where every repair is a struggle against the elements. But his efforts are Sisyphean. Life as a Barrøy on Barrøy remains precarious. Changes do occur in men’s and women’s roles, reflected in part by who gets a literal chair to sit on at meals, while world crises—a war, Sweden’s financial troubles—have unexpected impact. Yet the drama here occurs in small increments, season by season, following nature’s rhythm through deaths and births, moments of joy and deep sorrow. The translator’s decision to use roughly translated phrases in conversation—i.e., “Tha’s goen’ nohvar” for "You’re going nowhere")—slows the reading down at first but ends up drawing readers more deeply into the world of Barrøy and its prickly, intensely alive inhabitants.
A deeply satisfying novel, both sensuously vivid and remarkably poignant.Pub Date: April 7, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-77196-319-0
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Biblioasis
Review Posted Online: Jan. 12, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2020
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