There’s a hint of Isak Dinesen in La Farge’s lush romantic images of sheltered lives seething with unacknowledged desires...
This lavishly imagined and highly entertaining historical novel, inspired by the life and work of Parisian architect Georges-Eugène Haussmann (1809–91), is a distinct improvement over La Farge’s somewhat cluttered debut, The Artist of the Missing (1999).
Both an opening “Note to the English Edition” and a summary “Afterword” identify this as an English translation of a 1922 tale by one (presumably fictional) Paul Poissel. The story they enclose weaves its way circuitously toward a focus on Haussmann, beginning with an extended account of the early life of a foundling named Madeleine, rescued from the Seine to which her (widowed) biological father had consigned her, raised in a convent where she nourishes her delusions of noble birth, then “adopted” by De Fonce, a cunning “demolition man” who becomes both her lover and her introduction to the glittering social world of which the much-admired (and married) baron Haussmann is a prominent member. La Farge’s occasionally wheezy plot, which ranges over nearly half a century and pauses for numerous digressive episodes, matters rather less than do his informed and densely detailed pictures of the city and its environs which the brilliant planner (whose creative energies realize many of the Second Empire’s utopian dreams) reshapes from its medieval origins. And the visionary bureaucrat indulges all the while his passions for the similar perfection of ardent, willing women—notably Madeleine, who becomes his mistress, bears his child, and accomplishes her revenge for Haussmann’s benign neglect of her in a series of skillfully staged climactic scenes within the reconstructed city, at a lavish costume ball (where Madeleine, costumed as Marie Antoinette, meets “author” Paul Poissel), and at the imperial country retreat at Compiègne. The tensions among duty, artifice, and passion are thus vividly played out in a superbly realized period setting.
There’s a hint of Isak Dinesen in La Farge’s lush romantic images of sheltered lives seething with unacknowledged desires and complexities. An unusual, and unusually compelling, novel.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-374-16833-4
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2001
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
IN THE NEWS
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
This book sings with the terrible silence of dead civilizations in which once there was valor.
Written with quiet dignity that builds to a climax of tragic force, this book about the dissolution of an African tribe, its traditions, and values, represents a welcome departure from the familiar "Me, white brother" genre.
Written by a Nigerian African trained in missionary schools, this novel tells quietly the story of a brave man, Okonkwo, whose life has absolute validity in terms of his culture, and who exercises his prerogative as a warrior, father, and husband with unflinching single mindedness. But into the complex Nigerian village filters the teachings of strangers, teachings so alien to the tribe, that resistance is impossible. One must distinguish a force to be able to oppose it, and to most, the talk of Christian salvation is no more than the babbling of incoherent children. Still, with his guns and persistence, the white man, amoeba-like, gradually absorbs the native culture and in despair, Okonkwo, unable to withstand the corrosion of what he, alone, understands to be the life force of his people, hangs himself. In the formlessness of the dying culture, it is the missionary who takes note of the event, reminding himself to give Okonkwo's gesture a line or two in his work, The Pacification of the Primitive Tribes of the Lower Niger.
This book sings with the terrible silence of dead civilizations in which once there was valor.Pub Date: Jan. 23, 1958
ISBN: 0385474547
Page Count: 207
Publisher: McDowell, Obolensky
Review Posted Online: April 23, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1958
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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