Elegant prose and an occasional frisson mask, for a while, the ultimate pointlessness of this tall tale.
Samuel Johnson and his biographer find themselves at the mercy of Boswell’s mad younger brother in a literary conceit from Baruth (The X President, 2003).
They’re an odd couple, the London literary lion and the Scottish acolyte more than 30 years his junior, yet they’re already fast friends just two months after their first meeting. On a summer day in 1763, they have planned an excursion down the Thames, unaware they are being shadowed by James Boswell’s 19-year-old brother John. He has been tracking his brother since dawn; he watched James flirting with two whores in the park, then followed him to a house where James made love to Peggy, a Scottish skivvy. When John bursts in on Peggy after his brother’s departure, brandishing pistols and vowing to kill her if she sees James again, we realize he is, as he tells Peggy, “genuinely mad.” Indeed, he had been confined in an asylum only months earlier. Arriving in London, he has discovered James’s journal. The realization that his brother has been excluding him from his social circle enrages John; he has planned this July 30 as a day of reckoning when, armed and dangerous, he will confront and expose James and Johnson simultaneously. (John has an animus against Johnson too, because he’s persuaded himself that the writer is his clandestine platonic lover.) Baruth interrupts his story of the big day with flashbacks to the Boswells’ Edinburgh childhood and James’ social climbing in London, combining John’s unreliable first-person narration with James’ point-of-view. The story only works if we find John as worthy of interest as his famous targets; sadly, we don’t. Madness is not inherently fascinating, and John’s asylum experience is barely touched on. Baruth does manage to whip up suspense around the eventual showdown at a coffeehouse; elsewhere our enjoyment derives from the story of James Boswell’s ascent, buttressed by delightful period detail.
Elegant prose and an occasional frisson mask, for a while, the ultimate pointlessness of this tall tale.Pub Date: May 1, 2009
ISBN: 978-1-56947-559-1
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Soho
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2009
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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