A historical novel that’s more interested in famous names than emotional resonance.
In Myers’ (Paris 1935: Destiny’s Crossroads, 2011, etc.) latest novel, a veteran literary agent makes his way through the literary scene of interwar Paris.
Few places evoke nostalgia like the City of Light in the 1920s, and Myers doesn’t skimp on the literary and historical details in his latest novel: His protagonist, Bill Lawrence, an American war veteran turned literary agent, encounters a bevy of famous writers and artists, although Ernest Hemingway, who provides the novel with its guiding spirit, never makes an appearance. When Kurt Eckhart, an old friend of Bill’s from the war, gets in touch about a manuscript he’s writing about his postwar life in Berlin, Bill is immediately intrigued. He and his American expatriate friend, Kate Lundberg, help Kurt edit his book; Bill believes it will compete with the novel Hemingway is writing—which will eventually become A Farewell to Arms. Kurt’s novel-within-the-novel has essentially the same plot as that Hemingway masterpiece, and although the book emphasizes the superiority of Kurt’s vision, it inevitably suffers from the constant allusions to Hemingway’s oeuvre—it feels like a pale imitation of those classic works. Myers’ book, meanwhile, bears more than a passing resemblance to The Sun Also Rises. The author unfortunately assumes that readers will be ignorant of the history of the period; every historical figure is introduced with a short biography, and the last third of the book rejects dramatic action in favor of long scenes featuring characters rehashing well-known historical events. Readers with no knowledge of this material may find this aspect educational, but it may be frustrating for the better informed. Myers’ depiction of women is particularly disturbing; he seems fixated on lesbian sexuality, and yet his women seem inclined to fall for men. At one point, Djuna Barnes, the bisexual author of the 1936 novel Nightwood and a central character in this book, recovers from her difficult break with a female lover by becoming involved with Kurt. In a novel so concerned with the historical record, some readers may find this invention alarming.
A historical novel that’s more interested in famous names than emotional resonance.Pub Date: Nov. 28, 2012
ISBN: 978-1481100465
Page Count: 246
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: May 2, 2013
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
Doerr captures the sights and sounds of wartime and focuses, refreshingly, on the innate goodness of his major characters.
Doerr presents us with two intricate stories, both of which take place during World War II; late in the novel, inevitably, they intersect.
In August 1944, Marie-Laure LeBlanc is a blind 16-year-old living in the walled port city of Saint-Malo in Brittany and hoping to escape the effects of Allied bombing. D-Day took place two months earlier, and Cherbourg, Caen and Rennes have already been liberated. She’s taken refuge in this city with her great-uncle Etienne, at first a fairly frightening figure to her. Marie-Laure’s father was a locksmith and craftsman who made scale models of cities that Marie-Laure studied so she could travel around on her own. He also crafted clever and intricate boxes, within which treasures could be hidden. Parallel to the story of Marie-Laure we meet Werner and Jutta Pfennig, a brother and sister, both orphans who have been raised in the Children’s House outside Essen, in Germany. Through flashbacks we learn that Werner had been a curious and bright child who developed an obsession with radio transmitters and receivers, both in their infancies during this period. Eventually, Werner goes to a select technical school and then, at 18, into the Wehrmacht, where his technical aptitudes are recognized and he’s put on a team trying to track down illegal radio transmissions. Etienne and Marie-Laure are responsible for some of these transmissions, but Werner is intrigued since what she’s broadcasting is innocent—she shares her passion for Jules Verne by reading aloud 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea. A further subplot involves Marie-Laure’s father’s having hidden a valuable diamond, one being tracked down by Reinhold von Rumpel, a relentless German sergeant-major.
Doerr captures the sights and sounds of wartime and focuses, refreshingly, on the innate goodness of his major characters.Pub Date: May 6, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-4767-4658-6
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: March 5, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2014
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
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