A worthy addition to the shelf of books about the immigrant experience.
Several families emigrate from Sweden to Minnesota in the final years of the 19th century in Swedish journalist and novelist Larsmo's affecting, scrupulously detailed novel.
Anna and Gustaf Klar and their three children travel in steerage from England to New York and along the way make friends with reticent widowed Mrs. Lundgren, her strange son, David, and chatty Inga. After a short stint in New York, they all make their way to St. Paul, where they settle in a small immigrant community down in a ravine. Larsmo follows the members of the group and some of their new neighbors through the next couple of decades. As the novel goes on, the two Klar daughters, Elisabet and particularly Ellen, emerge as its central characters. Most of the novel consists of the stuff of daily life. Characters go to school, get temporary and then more permanent jobs, fall in love and marry, and sometimes die. The mysterious David gets a more dramatic storyline. Chapters called “The Tragic Story of Agnes Karin, David, and Horrible Hans”—rather than the place names Larsmo normally uses as chapter titles—detail a story that includes a murder and a stint in prison. The novel also veers off course to include the story of a lynching and edited transcripts of actual newspaper features about St. Paul generally and Swede Hollow specifically. Those looking for a conventional plot won't find it here: Larsmo writes believable scenes grounded in sensory experience, with relatively complicated characters, in some sort of chronological order, but also seems content to branch out into what are essentially self-contained short stories about characters peripheral to the main intertwined family saga.
A worthy addition to the shelf of books about the immigrant experience.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-5179-0451-7
Page Count: 312
Publisher: Univ. of Minnesota
Review Posted Online: July 14, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2019
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 modern day fable, with modern implications in a deceiving simplicity, by the author of Dickens. Dali and Others (Reynal & Hitchcock, p. 138), whose critical brilliance is well adapted to this type of satire. This tells of the revolt on a farm, against humans, when the pigs take over the intellectual superiority, training the horses, cows, sheep, etc., into acknowledging their greatness. The first hints come with the reading out of a pig who instigated the building of a windmill, so that the electric power would be theirs, the idea taken over by Napoleon who becomes topman with no maybes about it. Napoleon trains the young puppies to be his guards, dickers with humans, gradually instigates a reign of terror, and breaks the final commandment against any animal walking on two legs. The old faithful followers find themselves no better off for food and work than they were when man ruled them, learn their final disgrace when they see Napoleon and Squealer carousing with their enemies... A basic statement of the evils of dictatorship in that it not only corrupts the leaders, but deadens the intelligence and awareness of those led so that tyranny is inevitable. Mr. Orwell's animals exist in their own right, with a narrative as individual as it is apt in political parody.
Pub Date: Aug. 26, 1946
ISBN: 0452277507
Page Count: 114
Publisher: Harcourt, Brace
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1946
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