Twenty years into the epidemic, a work with something truly new to say about AIDS: that’s quite an achievement.
Nine honest, unsentimental debut stories about women grappling with AIDS, from memoirist Peterson (Penitent, with Roses, 2001), herself HIV-positive.
Presumably her experiences as hotline volunteer gave the Jewish, middle-class author some of the details she uses to describe the lives of her generally poor and black protagonists, but it’s the empathy of an artist that enables her to enter their minds and hearts with such acuity. From the collection’s hopeful opening with “A Miracle,” in which a dying woman is healed and given a new start by a surprisingly down-at-the-heels deity (“You’d think God would pay more attention to his appearance,” comments Lucinda), to its painfully beautiful conclusion in “Song of Camille,” Peterson faultlessly captures the rhythms of African-American speech and the reality of life at the bottom of American society without ever condescending to her subjects. These are tough, intelligent women; a running joke in the final tale has Camille following up each foulmouthed, bad-girl declaration with a shrewd psychological insight she invariably attributes to her white therapist, but the fact is no authority figure needs to explain their problems to these characters. They got their disease from drug use, prostitution, and men as messed-up as they were, some of them passed it to their children, and they live every day with the consequences and the guilt. Ironically, the three least interesting stories—“Africa,” “The Woman in the Long Green Coat,” and “In the Grove”—deal with educated people closer to the author’s own background, although “In the Grove” closes with a moving affirmation of solidarity among the stricken that resonates throughout the text. “Song of Camille” is the masterpiece here, a breathtaking blend of humor, fury, and sorrow that realistically reminds us there are no unmixed happy endings—the heroine achieves real understanding and self-control just as she loses her job and her daughter is suspended from school—but also conveys a piercingly moving sense of hope.
Twenty years into the epidemic, a work with something truly new to say about AIDS: that’s quite an achievement.Pub Date: April 1, 2004
ISBN: 0-8070-8352-6
Page Count: 204
Publisher: Beacon Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2004
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
It's being called a novel, but it is more a hybrid: short-stories/essays/confessions about the Vietnam War—the subject that O'Brien reasonably comes back to with every book. Some of these stories/memoirs are very good in their starkness and factualness: the title piece, about what a foot soldier actually has on him (weights included) at any given time, lends a palpability that makes the emotional freight (fear, horror, guilt) correspond superbly. Maybe the most moving piece here is "On The Rainy River," about a draftee's ambivalence about going, and how he decided to go: "I would go to war—I would kill and maybe die—because I was embarrassed not to." But so much else is so structurally coy that real effects are muted and disadvantaged: O'Brien is writing a book more about earnestness than about war, and the peekaboos of this isn't really me but of course it truly is serve no true purpose. They make this an annoyingly arty book, hiding more than not behind Hemingwayesque time-signatures and puerile repetitions about war (and memory and everything else, for that matter) being hell and heaven both. A disappointment.
Pub Date: March 28, 1990
ISBN: 0618706410
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
Review Posted Online: Oct. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 1990
SEEN & HEARD
IN THE NEWS
SEEN & HEARD
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