A provocative new picture of the “historical” Jesus.
Longley’s historical novel is the second volume of an extrapolation on the origins of Christianity.
The German critic Erich Auerbach famously writes that the Bible is “fraught with background”—it withholds more truths than it reveals. As much can be said of the gospels, and a variety of modern writers, from Norman Mailer to Robert Graves to José Saramago, have composed fictions intended to fill the gaps in the biography of Jesus. Longley joins their ranks with his Magdala Trilogy, a multivolume set designed to deliver a literary portrait of first-century Palestine made clearer in the light of new historical, textual and archaeological research. This book focuses on the adulthood and ministry of Jesus—here identified in the Aramaic as Joshua—and seeks to develop a believable profile of the man who started Christianity. In Longley’s version, Joshua shares the stage with Maria (Mary Magdalene), a Jewish prostitute and Jesus’ intimate, and Linus, a Roman soldier and the father of Maria’s son Marcus. Longley’s panoramic view of Joshua’s life benefits from the findings of the Jesus Seminar, a group of 20th-century scholars devoted to developing a more accurate understanding of the “historical Jesus”—the man apart from the myth. As such, Joshua is more man than God, though he remains holy. He is married and widowed; he loves, and has sex with, Maria; his miracles—and the miracles that seem to follow him—are more figurative than literal. But despite these elaborations, alterations and fabrications, Joshua remains a blessed figure and a hero. Longley’s volume is scrupulously researched but endlessly creative. Further, its historical Maria and its fictional Linus are worthy foils to the still-strong Joshua. (By book’s end, Maria is the novel’s real heroine.) And the author’s prose is lush and confident, though he writes with a sense of humility appropriate to one recalibrating scripture.
A provocative new picture of the “historical” Jesus.Pub Date: Nov. 18, 2009
ISBN: 978-1440178900
Page Count: 467
Publisher: iUniverse
Review Posted Online: Sept. 14, 2010
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
The writing is merely serviceable, and one can’t help but wish the author had found a way to present her material as...
An unlikely love story set amid the horrors of a Nazi death camp.
Based on real people and events, this debut novel follows Lale Sokolov, a young Slovakian Jew sent to Auschwitz in 1942. There, he assumes the heinous task of tattooing incoming Jewish prisoners with the dehumanizing numbers their SS captors use to identify them. When the Tätowierer, as he is called, meets fellow prisoner Gita Furman, 17, he is immediately smitten. Eventually, the attraction becomes mutual. Lale proves himself an operator, at once cagey and courageous: As the Tätowierer, he is granted special privileges and manages to smuggle food to starving prisoners. Through female prisoners who catalog the belongings confiscated from fellow inmates, Lale gains access to jewels, which he trades to a pair of local villagers for chocolate, medicine, and other items. Meanwhile, despite overwhelming odds, Lale and Gita are able to meet privately from time to time and become lovers. In 1944, just ahead of the arrival of Russian troops, Lale and Gita separately leave the concentration camp and experience harrowingly close calls. Suffice it to say they both survive. To her credit, the author doesn’t flinch from describing the depravity of the SS in Auschwitz and the unimaginable suffering of their victims—no gauzy evasions here, as in Boy in the Striped Pajamas. She also manages to raise, if not really explore, some trickier issues—the guilt of those Jews, like the tattooist, who survived by doing the Nazis’ bidding, in a sense betraying their fellow Jews; and the complicity of those non-Jews, like the Slovaks in Lale’s hometown, who failed to come to the aid of their beleaguered countrymen.
The writing is merely serviceable, and one can’t help but wish the author had found a way to present her material as nonfiction. Still, this is a powerful, gut-wrenching tale that is hard to shake off.Pub Date: Sept. 4, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-06-279715-5
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: July 16, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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