A thoughtful, original historical novel sure to thrill any serious art lover.
Ireland’s historical novel imagines a fictional diary written by Jeanne Hébuterne, Amedeo Modigliani’s common-law wife, chronicling their tempestuous relationship in Paris.
Hébuterne is only 19 when she meets the famed painter, who is a much more mature 33. She falls deeply in love and refuses to leave him despite her conservative, petit-bourgeois Catholic family’s strenuous objections: They are not keen on the fact that he is a Jewish artist, not to mention an ostentatiously heavy drinker. Jeanne’s father had hoped she would become a nun—the often dissolute life she leads with Modi, as she calls him, couldn’t be further from the quietude of religious devotion. Their life together isn’t easy—they are perpetually broke, and his struggle with tuberculosis (he contracted it when he was only 16) only intensifies his already erratic behavior. And his infamous love of drink is often merely a way to disguise the TB symptoms in order to avoid becoming a social outcast if word got out he was infected by such a deadly, contagious disease. Ireland poignantly depicts the tragically conflicted Jeanne. On the one hand she is desperately hopeful that the birth of her second child with Modi will finally give her stability (she pines to officially marry him and even fantasizes about her wedding dress), but on the other hand, she realizes that Modi’s health is rapidly declining and that his days are numbered. She also worries about her own fate: “I place my hand on my belly, and watch Modi, who is doubled over, coughing, and gasping for breath, and see my future. I’m happy that little Jeanne isn’t here with us to share this fate. She must not. Above all, she must not.”
Ireland pulls off a difficult literary trick here: She manages to build a suspenseful atmosphere despite the forgone conclusion of this historical tale. One can’t help but sympathize with Jeanne, who surrenders so much of herself for a doomed love. A lively portrait of Modigliani emerges, too—he’s both a rakishly irresponsible artist as well as a bookish intellectual who “often carries a copy of Dante’s Divine Comedy in his pocket.” The author adeptly captures the remarkable artistic spirit of the early 20th century, particularly in Montparnasse, which was the stomping ground of so many notable artists like Picasso, Soutine, Utrillo, Apollinaire, and scores of others. The book includes gorgeous reproductions of not only Modigliani’s artwork, but also that of his contemporaries, including the haunting work (in a style similar to her lover’s) of Hébuterne, a gifted artist whose formidable legacy was entirely lost in Modigliani’s shadow. In fact, this is the central strength of the book: Hébuterne is rescued from being merely a bit player in Modigliani’s life. The author depicts her as a tragic figure (her saturnine end is all but foreordained) but fascinating in her own right—intellectually sharp if sometimes childishly naïve.
A thoughtful, original historical novel sure to thrill any serious art lover.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: 9780985054557
Page Count: 210
Publisher: Charles Square Press
Review Posted Online: Jan. 16, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2023
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
A dramatic, vividly detailed reconstruction of a little-known aspect of the Vietnam War.
A young woman’s experience as a nurse in Vietnam casts a deep shadow over her life.
When we learn that the farewell party in the opening scene is for Frances “Frankie” McGrath’s older brother—“a golden boy, a wild child who could make the hardest heart soften”—who is leaving to serve in Vietnam in 1966, we feel pretty certain that poor Finley McGrath is marked for death. Still, it’s a surprise when the fateful doorbell rings less than 20 pages later. His death inspires his sister to enlist as an Army nurse, and this turn of events is just the beginning of a roller coaster of a plot that’s impressive and engrossing if at times a bit formulaic. Hannah renders the experiences of the young women who served in Vietnam in all-encompassing detail. The first half of the book, set in gore-drenched hospital wards, mildewed dorm rooms, and boozy officers’ clubs, is an exciting read, tracking the transformation of virginal, uptight Frankie into a crack surgical nurse and woman of the world. Her tensely platonic romance with a married surgeon ends when his broken, unbreathing body is airlifted out by helicopter; she throws her pent-up passion into a wild affair with a soldier who happens to be her dead brother’s best friend. In the second part of the book, after the war, Frankie seems to experience every possible bad break. A drawback of the story is that none of the secondary characters in her life are fully three-dimensional: Her dismissive, chauvinistic father and tight-lipped, pill-popping mother, her fellow nurses, and her various love interests are more plot devices than people. You’ll wish you could have gone to Vegas and placed a bet on the ending—while it’s against all the odds, you’ll see it coming from a mile away.
A dramatic, vividly detailed reconstruction of a little-known aspect of the Vietnam War.Pub Date: Feb. 6, 2024
ISBN: 9781250178633
Page Count: 480
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Nov. 4, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2023
PERSPECTIVES
BOOK TO SCREEN
SEEN & HEARD
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