Six little mysteries that quietly capture the breadth of the human experience.
Tender, tinder-dry stories about lonely people making their ways through this life.
Yoon (Snow Hunters, 2013, etc.) created a minimalist story of astonishing austerity in his debut novel and largely continues in that vein with his new collection of sad stories. In the opener, “A Willow and the Moon,” an orphaned woman who grew up in a sanitarium in the Hudson Valley tells the story of her coming-of-age, her father’s abandonment of her, and a secret her mother nearly took to the grave. “Still a Fire” is a dual portrait of Mikel, a young man trying to survive in a European shantytown just after World War II, and Karine, the morphine-addicted nurse he meets after he is injured by a stray land mine. In “Galicia,” devoted wife Antje temporarily and impulsively leaves her husband to venture through the Iberian Peninsula with Félix, a handsome young man she meets on a train platform. “Vladivostok Station” is set in Russia and follows Misha, a young man who meets a childhood friend and subsequently reconnects with his father. In the title story, a young Chinese woman named Faye is persuaded by a stranger to return home to Shanghai, with very mixed results. In the finale, “Milner Field,” we get another travelogue about a divorcée and his beloved daughter, but one that mixes in tiny, heartbreaking moments of mortal tragedy. Yoon’s stories are never melodramatic; most of the time nothing much happens, really. But it’s rare to find a writer this patient, one willing to let the stories breathe and play out in their own time. Despite his literary austerity, Yoon’s dazzling use of wordplay, pacing, and the quiet authenticity of his characters to instill emotion in his audience makes him one of the most evocative writers working today.
Six little mysteries that quietly capture the breadth of the human experience.Pub Date: Aug. 15, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-5011-5408-9
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: June 5, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2017
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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