Readers may come away with little understanding of what made Cassatt and Degas click; nevertheless, they’ll gain a better...
Oliveira (My Name is Mary Sutter, 2011) draws from research and imagination to recreate the years when two impressionists—Mary Cassatt and Edgar Degas—engaged in an on-again, off-again relationship.
Cassatt, the daughter of well-to-do Philadelphians, is a determined woman whose first stay in Paris is interrupted by the Franco-Prussian War. Following her return and mild success with portraiture, she’s ready to pack her brushes and leave France behind a second time after her submission to the Paris Salon exhibition is rejected. However, an arranged meeting with admirer Degas and his invitation to exhibit with a group of independent artists are all the incentives Cassatt needs to stay. Although the relationship is often contentious, and Degas’ promises leave much to be desired, Degas introduces Cassatt to his inner circle of friends, a socially prominent group that includes writer Émile Zola and artists Édouard Manet and his paramour, Berthe Morisot, who’s married to Manet’s brother, Eugene. Degas, frustrated with increasingly poor eyesight and possessing a cruel and insensitive demeanor, becomes Cassatt’s mentor and, at times, tormentor. Often at odds, they send missives back and forth. Cassatt discovers a passion for vivid colors and embarks upon a productive period painting women and children; Degas studies the human form and strives to replicate his observations in his paintings and other renderings of ballerinas. Although sometimes they’re completely alienated, they remain linked through their art and (although Degas is almost loath to admit it) love. The book is accomplished and well-researched, but the relationship between Cassatt and Degas isn’t as engaging as the secondary story: the love affair between Morisot and Manet.
Readers may come away with little understanding of what made Cassatt and Degas click; nevertheless, they’ll gain a better understanding of impressionism.Pub Date: Feb. 4, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-670-78579-7
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: Oct. 19, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2013
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
This book sings with the terrible silence of dead civilizations in which once there was valor.
Written with quiet dignity that builds to a climax of tragic force, this book about the dissolution of an African tribe, its traditions, and values, represents a welcome departure from the familiar "Me, white brother" genre.
Written by a Nigerian African trained in missionary schools, this novel tells quietly the story of a brave man, Okonkwo, whose life has absolute validity in terms of his culture, and who exercises his prerogative as a warrior, father, and husband with unflinching single mindedness. But into the complex Nigerian village filters the teachings of strangers, teachings so alien to the tribe, that resistance is impossible. One must distinguish a force to be able to oppose it, and to most, the talk of Christian salvation is no more than the babbling of incoherent children. Still, with his guns and persistence, the white man, amoeba-like, gradually absorbs the native culture and in despair, Okonkwo, unable to withstand the corrosion of what he, alone, understands to be the life force of his people, hangs himself. In the formlessness of the dying culture, it is the missionary who takes note of the event, reminding himself to give Okonkwo's gesture a line or two in his work, The Pacification of the Primitive Tribes of the Lower Niger.
This book sings with the terrible silence of dead civilizations in which once there was valor.Pub Date: Jan. 23, 1958
ISBN: 0385474547
Page Count: 207
Publisher: McDowell, Obolensky
Review Posted Online: April 23, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1958
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