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LADY OF THE SNAKES

Pastan (This Side of Married, 2004) is strong on domestic despair, but the story of the woman who lets a man take the credit...

A literary historian feels drawn to a 19th-century wife and mother who sacrificed all for her man.

A driven academic, Jane Levitsky loves her infant daughter Maisie and husband Billy, but most of her intellectual and emotional energy flows toward her research into the 19th-century Russian novelist Grigory Karkov and his wife Masha. Even during childbirth, Jane’s thoughts drift to Masha, whose diaries fascinate Jane as much as Karkov’s novels. Jane gets a prestigious assistant professorship at the University of Wisconsin, where the eminent Karkov scholar Otto Sigelman has just retired. Increasingly obsessed with her research and chafing at her domestic responsibilities, Jane hires a graduate student she is advising to be Maisie’s live-in babysitter. Meanwhile, Sigelman, who still comes regularly to his office next to Jane’s, disparages her emphasis on Masha’s importance as Karkov’s muse, but Jane begins to suspect Grigory may have lifted entire diary entries from his wife. On a trip to Chicago’s Newberry Library, Jane finds a tantalizing letter from Masha that may shed new light on her role in Karkov’s writing. But before Jane can thoroughly digest the letter, Billy calls to say Maisie is in the hospital. Jane must abort her trip, and by the time she gets back to Chicago, the letter has disappeared. Sigelman has stolen it. She steals it back. She also discovers that taken-for-granted Billy has slept with the babysitter. He moves out. She tracks down Karkov’s last descendent, who gives her a startling manuscript: Before her death, Masha wrote a novel Grigory claimed as his own with her blessing. Jane realizes her own life is out of balance. In an improbably happy ending, Jane reconciles with Billy, has a second child and begins her book on Masha.

Pastan (This Side of Married, 2004) is strong on domestic despair, but the story of the woman who lets a man take the credit for her artistic achievement never comes to life.

Pub Date: Jan. 1, 2008

ISBN: 978-0-15-101369-2

Page Count: 320

Publisher: Harcourt

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2007

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THE NIGHTINGALE

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

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THE HANDMAID'S TALE

Tinny perhaps, but still a minutely rendered and impressively steady feminist vision of apocalypse.

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The time is the not-so-distant future, when the US's spiraling social freedoms have finally called down a reaction, an Iranian-style repressive "monotheocracy" calling itself the Republic of Gilead—a Bible-thumping, racist, capital-punishing, and misogynistic rule that would do away with pleasure altogether were it not for one thing: that the Gileadan women, pure and true (as opposed to all the nonbelieving women, those who've ever been adulterous or married more than once), are found rarely fertile.

Thus are drafted a whole class of "handmaids," whose function is to bear the children of the elite, to be fecund or else (else being certain death, sent out to be toxic-waste removers on outlying islands). The narrative frame for Atwood's dystopian vision is the hopeless private testimony of one of these surrogate mothers, Offred ("of" plus the name of her male protector). Lying cradled by the body of the barren wife, being meanwhile serviced by the husband, Offred's "ceremony" must be successful—if she does not want to join the ranks of the other disappeared (which include her mother, her husband—dead—and small daughter, all taken away during the years of revolt). One Of her only human conduits is a gradually developing affair with her master's chauffeur—something that's balanced more than offset, though, by the master's hypocritically un-Puritan use of her as a kind of B-girl at private parties held by the ruling men in a spirit of nostalgia and lust. This latter relationship, edging into real need (the master's), is very effectively done; it highlights the handmaid's (read Everywoman's) eternal exploitation, profane or sacred ("We are two-legged wombs, that's all: sacred vessels, ambulatory chalices"). Atwood, to her credit, creates a chillingly specific, imaginable night-mare. The book is short on characterization—this is Atwood, never a warm writer, at her steeliest—and long on cynicism—it's got none of the human credibility of a work such as Walker Percy's Love In The Ruins. But the scariness is visceral, a world that's like a dangerous and even fatal grid, an electrified fence.

Tinny perhaps, but still a minutely rendered and impressively steady feminist vision of apocalypse.

Pub Date: Feb. 17, 1985

ISBN: 038549081X

Page Count: -

Publisher: Houghton Mifflin

Review Posted Online: Sept. 16, 2011

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 1985

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