This is not a novel for anyone who expects time to move in a straightforward fashion or for memories to cohere or for...
First-person fiction in the guise of an impressionistic memoir by an older woman recalling her small-town girlhood.
Many of the paragraphs in Savage's (The Way of the Dog, 2013, etc.) latest are made up of a single sentence, and most of them seem to stand on their own, not necessarily connecting to the previous one or the next, each isolated by white space. It’s as if the paragraphs are snowflakes, each unique, yet creating a cumulative effect through accretion. This is writing about writing, words about words, remembering through the distortions and inventions of memory. Many of the paragraphs, often many in a row, start with the words “I remember….” Others begin with “The time” and are often a series of sentence fragments, such as “The time Edward squeezed my head so hard it hurt.” Edward is one of the narrator’s two brothers, with whom she has lost all contact. Her other brother is Thornton—“And Thornton too without children, so it will end with us, probably.” Next paragraph, with rare continuity: “Which is for the best. I don’t see that we represent anything anymore.” The entirety of the novel takes place within the consciousness of the woman writing at her desk, much as she remembers that her mother once did. The reader senses that the mother went mad and wonders whether this is a reflection of the narrator’s projection: “Writing at the desk I sometimes get the feeling that I am my mother….I have no idea what the sentence I just wrote means.” Almost as an aside, she writes, without any explanation, that “having become thoroughly estranged from my parents by the time they died I am estranged from their ghosts as well.”
This is not a novel for anyone who expects time to move in a straightforward fashion or for memories to cohere or for beginnings and endings to be other than arbitrary.Pub Date: Nov. 11, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-56689-372-5
Page Count: 150
Publisher: Coffee House
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2014
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
A tour de force.
In 1974, a troubled Vietnam vet inherits a house from a fallen comrade and moves his family to Alaska.
After years as a prisoner of war, Ernt Allbright returned home to his wife, Cora, and daughter, Leni, a violent, difficult, restless man. The family moved so frequently that 13-year-old Leni went to five schools in four years. But when they move to Alaska, still very wild and sparsely populated, Ernt finds a landscape as raw as he is. As Leni soon realizes, “Everyone up here had two stories: the life before and the life now. If you wanted to pray to a weirdo god or live in a school bus or marry a goose, no one in Alaska was going to say crap to you.” There are many great things about this book—one of them is its constant stream of memorably formulated insights about Alaska. Another key example is delivered by Large Marge, a former prosecutor in Washington, D.C., who now runs the general store for the community of around 30 brave souls who live in Kaneq year-round. As she cautions the Allbrights, “Alaska herself can be Sleeping Beauty one minute and a bitch with a sawed-off shotgun the next. There’s a saying: Up here you can make one mistake. The second one will kill you.” Hannah’s (The Nightingale, 2015, etc.) follow-up to her series of blockbuster bestsellers will thrill her fans with its combination of Greek tragedy, Romeo and Juliet–like coming-of-age story, and domestic potboiler. She re-creates in magical detail the lives of Alaska's homesteaders in both of the state's seasons (they really only have two) and is just as specific and authentic in her depiction of the spiritual wounds of post-Vietnam America.
A tour de force.Pub Date: Feb. 6, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-312-57723-0
Page Count: 448
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Oct. 30, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2017
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