A bleak, affecting portrait that points to immeasurable collateral damage.
A Jewish man in 1940 Argentina confronts his mother’s fate when she’s confined in the Warsaw ghetto.
Born in Argentina, Amigorena grew up in France, whose language he writes in and where this novel has been nominated for several prizes, including the Prix Goncourt. It is part of a series of autobiographical novels the author, also a prolific screenwriter, has been writing since the 1990s, and in a preface, he calls the present novel “the source” of the project. The last chapter clarifies the connection. The narrative follows a few years in the life of Vicente Rosenberg, who moved to Argentina from Poland in 1928, leaving behind his mother. Despite her many letters pleading for a response, he does not write to her for years, even as antisemitism rises in Europe. Then German troops invade Poland and the Nazis create the Warsaw ghetto. Shortly after the novel opens in late 1940, Vicente gets a letter in which his mother describes hardships in the ghetto and asks him to send money. He thinks of all the chances he had to get her out of Warsaw. He feels the onset of a “sense of the guilt that he would never truly erase from his heart.” The novel tracks the deepening of this guilt and its effect on Vicente and his wife and three children. In the next few years, the letters stop and news of the death camps starts to reach Vicente. His life becomes a “desolate void” in which “his wife and children scarcely existed.” He stops speaking and gambles compulsively. Amigorena charts the man’s guilt-driven psychological deterioration in careful detail, from small matters (“What difference would it make whether or not he ate more gnocchi?”) to abject misery. Even in extremes of emotion, the translation offers controlled, lucid prose.
A bleak, affecting portrait that points to immeasurable collateral damage.Pub Date: Aug. 23, 2022
ISBN: 978-0-06-301833-4
Page Count: 176
Publisher: HarperVia
Review Posted Online: May 24, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2022
A dramatic, vividly detailed reconstruction of a little-known aspect of the Vietnam War.
A young woman’s experience as a nurse in Vietnam casts a deep shadow over her life.
When we learn that the farewell party in the opening scene is for Frances “Frankie” McGrath’s older brother—“a golden boy, a wild child who could make the hardest heart soften”—who is leaving to serve in Vietnam in 1966, we feel pretty certain that poor Finley McGrath is marked for death. Still, it’s a surprise when the fateful doorbell rings less than 20 pages later. His death inspires his sister to enlist as an Army nurse, and this turn of events is just the beginning of a roller coaster of a plot that’s impressive and engrossing if at times a bit formulaic. Hannah renders the experiences of the young women who served in Vietnam in all-encompassing detail. The first half of the book, set in gore-drenched hospital wards, mildewed dorm rooms, and boozy officers’ clubs, is an exciting read, tracking the transformation of virginal, uptight Frankie into a crack surgical nurse and woman of the world. Her tensely platonic romance with a married surgeon ends when his broken, unbreathing body is airlifted out by helicopter; she throws her pent-up passion into a wild affair with a soldier who happens to be her dead brother’s best friend. In the second part of the book, after the war, Frankie seems to experience every possible bad break. A drawback of the story is that none of the secondary characters in her life are fully three-dimensional: Her dismissive, chauvinistic father and tight-lipped, pill-popping mother, her fellow nurses, and her various love interests are more plot devices than people. You’ll wish you could have gone to Vegas and placed a bet on the ending—while it’s against all the odds, you’ll see it coming from a mile away.
A dramatic, vividly detailed reconstruction of a little-known aspect of the Vietnam War.Pub Date: Feb. 6, 2024
ISBN: 9781250178633
Page Count: 480
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Nov. 4, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2023
PERSPECTIVES
BOOK TO SCREEN
Lush, gorgeous, precise language and propulsive plotting sweep readers into a story as intelligent as it is atmospheric.
In 16th-century Madrid, a crypto-Jew with a talent for casting spells tries to steer clear of the Inquisition.
Luzia Cotado, a scullion and an orphan, has secrets to keep: “It was a game she and her mother had played, saying one thing and thinking another, the bits and pieces of Hebrew handed down like chipped plates.” Also handed down are “refranes”—proverbs—in “not quite Spanish, just as Luzia was not quite Spanish.” When Luzia sings the refranes, they take on power. “Aboltar cazal, aboltar mazal” (“A change of scene, a change of fortune”) can mend a torn gown or turn burnt bread into a perfect loaf; “Quien no risica, no rosica” (“Whoever doesn’t laugh, doesn’t bloom”) can summon a riot of foliage in the depths of winter. The Inquisition hangs over the story like Chekhov’s famous gun on the wall. When Luzia’s employer catches her using magic, the ambitions of both mistress and servant catapult her into fame and danger. A new, even more ambitious patron instructs his supernatural servant, Guillén Santángel, to train Luzia for a magical contest. Santángel, not Luzia, is the familiar of the title; he has been tricked into trading his freedom and luck to his master’s family in exchange for something he no longer craves but can’t give up. The novel comes up against an issue common in fantasy fiction: Why don’t the characters just use their magic to solve all their problems? Bardugo has clearly given it some thought, but her solutions aren’t quite convincing, especially toward the end of the book. These small faults would be harder to forgive if she weren’t such a beautiful writer. Part fairy tale, part political thriller, part romance, the novel unfolds like a winter tree bursting into unnatural bloom in response to one of Luzia’s refranes, as she and Santángel learn about power, trust, betrayal, and love.
Lush, gorgeous, precise language and propulsive plotting sweep readers into a story as intelligent as it is atmospheric.Pub Date: April 9, 2024
ISBN: 9781250884251
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Flatiron Books
Review Posted Online: Feb. 3, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2024
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