Published successfully in Germany in 2003, the novel arrives freshly translated by the reliable Steven T. Murray, who did...
Denis Diderot, hero of the Enlightenment, battles dark forces galore, in novelist Prange’s U.S. debut.
A bunch of the boys were whoopin’ it up in the Café Procope—philosophers, free-thinkers, assorted roisterers and rabble-rousers—when suddenly a great idea was born. It’s Paris, 1746, the Café Procope, an established hang-out for France’s young-gun intellectuals. A publisher is in the house this particular night, and it’s he who first mentions that high-octane word: encyclopedia, though at the time it hardly seems all that explosive. The publisher views it modestly enough, but the effect on a certain restless spirit is electrifying. Diderot, writer, visionary, ambitious to his eyeteeth, sees it as an opportunity to collect in one place all the accumulated knowledge of humankind, a kind of utilitarian dictionary, addressing and defining everything on earth from astronomy to zithers. But it’s an idea that quickly generates jumpiness in the corridors of power. Shrewdly, Father Radominsky, a Jesuit priest sent to France as confessor to Louis XV’s Queen Maria, connects the epic quality of the Encyclopedia with anti-establishment skepticism. He’s right, of course, and so the time-honored struggle between rebellion and repression, between the status quo and that which attacks it, is joined once again, neither side giving an inch. As a bloodied but unbowed Diderot courageously taunts: “It is my job to write books, and yours to burn them.” Plagued, however, by censorship, money and priestly problems, Diderot, at his lowest ebb, is saved only by the boundless love of a truly good woman, who may in fact be too good to be true.
Published successfully in Germany in 2003, the novel arrives freshly translated by the reliable Steven T. Murray, who did Stieg Larsson’s The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. Despite some soapy bits, it deserves to score with American audiences, too.Pub Date: April 5, 2011
ISBN: 978-1-4391-6748-9
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Atria
Review Posted Online: Feb. 20, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2011
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
Entertaining and thoroughly engrossing.
Another reboot of Jane Austen?!? Hadlow pulls it off in a smart, heartfelt novel devoted to bookish Mary, middle of the five sisters in Pride and Prejudice.
Part 1 recaps Pride and Prejudice through Mary’s eyes, climaxing with the humiliating moment when she sings poorly at a party and older sister Elizabeth goads their father to cut her off in front of everyone. The sisters’ friend Charlotte, who marries the unctuous Mr. Collins after Elizabeth rejects him, emerges as a pivotal character; her conversations with Mary are even tougher-minded here than those with Elizabeth depicted by Austen. In Part 2, two years later, Mary observes on a visit that Charlotte is deferential but remote with her husband; she forms an intellectual friendship with the neglected and surprisingly nice Mr. Collins that leads to Charlotte’s asking Mary to leave. In Part 3, Mary finds refuge in London with her kindly aunt and uncle, Mr. and Mrs. Gardiner. Mrs. Gardiner is the second motherly woman, after Longbourn housekeeper Mrs. Hill, to try to undo the psychic damage wrought by Mary’s actual mother, shallow, status-obsessed Mrs. Bennet, by building up her confidence and buying her some nice clothes (funded by guilt-ridden Lizzy). Sure enough, two suitors appear: Tom Hayward, a poetry-loving lawyer who relishes Mary’s intellect but urges her to also express her feelings; and William Ryder, charming but feckless inheritor of a large fortune, whom naturally Mrs. Bennet loudly favors. It takes some maneuvering to orchestrate the estrangement of Mary and Tom, so clearly right for each other, but debut novelist Hadlow manages it with aplomb in a bravura passage describing a walking tour of the Lake District rife with seething complications furthered by odious Caroline Bingley. Her comeuppance at Mary’s hands marks the welcome final step in our heroine’s transformation from a self-doubting wallflower to a vibrant, self-assured woman who deserves her happy ending. Hadlow traces that progression with sensitivity, emotional clarity, and a quiet edge of social criticism Austen would have relished.
Entertaining and thoroughly engrossing.Pub Date: March 31, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-250-12941-3
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: Dec. 22, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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