A chorus line of freaks throughout the ages parades here in a determinedly sympathetic but thin and clumsily all-inclusive debut from poet Ditchoff. From the favored dwarves of the Pharaohs to an American hermaphrodite looking back from the 1970s at his/her celebrated career in Weimar Berlin, the narrative winds its way through ancient, medieval, and modern times, lingering for emphasis on the more famous cases. Screaming curses, the hunchback Aesop, favorite of King Croesus, is thrown to his death at Delphi after angering the powers-that-be; bearded Princess Wilgefortis is martyred in fifth-century Lusitania for preferring Christianity to her royal betrothed; dwarf Sir Jeffrey Hudson attains unusual heights of influence as the Queen's trusted courier in the 17th-century court of Charles I in London; and Catherine the Great of Russia seduces the giant Nikita and bears his son. Once the scene shifts to America, the images of similar ``prodigies'' are associated exclusively with more popular entertainments: P.T. Barnum, Barnum & Bailey, Ringling Bros., and ultimately Hollywood (in Tod Browning's controversial film Freaks of 1932). After the Depression and WW II, however, interest in sideshows waned, and with advances in medical technology, the physical aberrations themselves began to be ``fixed''a development regarded with horror by survivors of the close-knit carnival communities as being akin to Nazi cleansing efforts. But while a bevy of narrators interweave points of view to provide continuity as the pageant unfolds, the emphasis is on history rather than on the individuals, leaving no lasting, tangible impressions when all is said and done. Shallow furrows in a fallow field, these snippets and summaries make clear that the world of the malformed could richly reward more sustained efforts to fathom it.
Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1995
ISBN: 1-56689-035-7
Page Count: 250
Publisher: Coffee House
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 1995
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
Suspenseful, full of incident, and not obviously necessary.
Atwood goes back to Gilead.
The Handmaid’s Tale (1985), consistently regarded as a masterpiece of 20th-century literature, has gained new attention in recent years with the success of the Hulu series as well as fresh appreciation from readers who feel like this story has new relevance in America’s current political climate. Atwood herself has spoken about how news headlines have made her dystopian fiction seem eerily plausible, and it’s not difficult to imagine her wanting to revisit Gilead as the TV show has sped past where her narrative ended. Like the novel that preceded it, this sequel is presented as found documents—first-person accounts of life inside a misogynistic theocracy from three informants. There is Agnes Jemima, a girl who rejects the marriage her family arranges for her but still has faith in God and Gilead. There’s Daisy, who learns on her 16th birthday that her whole life has been a lie. And there's Aunt Lydia, the woman responsible for turning women into Handmaids. This approach gives readers insight into different aspects of life inside and outside Gilead, but it also leads to a book that sometimes feels overstuffed. The Handmaid’s Tale combined exquisite lyricism with a powerful sense of urgency, as if a thoughtful, perceptive woman was racing against time to give witness to her experience. That narrator hinted at more than she said; Atwood seemed to trust readers to fill in the gaps. This dynamic created an atmosphere of intimacy. However curious we might be about Gilead and the resistance operating outside that country, what we learn here is that what Atwood left unsaid in the first novel generated more horror and outrage than explicit detail can. And the more we get to know Agnes, Daisy, and Aunt Lydia, the less convincing they become. It’s hard, of course, to compete with a beloved classic, so maybe the best way to read this new book is to forget about The Handmaid’s Tale and enjoy it as an artful feminist thriller.
Suspenseful, full of incident, and not obviously necessary.Pub Date: Sept. 10, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-385-54378-1
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Nan A. Talese
Review Posted Online: Sept. 3, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2019
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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