A fun romp through Paris and history, one that nevertheless makes us understand that the sins of the past are not truly past.
A melancholy and mournful tale of the past's inextricable relationship to the present.
Faulks (Pistache Returns, 2017, etc.) gives us a novel that uses World War II as a way to think about the contemporary refugee crisis and nationalist politics in Europe. He brings us the story of Tariq, a lovelorn, disaffected, and perpetually aroused Algerian teenager whose unfulfilling studies and infatuation with his virginal classmate Laila fill him with romantic dreams of fleeing his home for the streets of Europe. The son of a half-French, half-Arab woman whose father was a French settler, Tariq eventually abandons Algeria for Paris. Meanwhile, an American academic named Hannah arrives in Paris in order to do research on a historical project about the lives of Parisian women under the Vichy government during the war. Hannah is more concerned with the past than the present, but she feels increasingly empty in her history-obsessed life. As Tariq floats through the streets of Paris, looking for shelter and work, his and Hannah's paths eventually cross; soon, Tariq is a lodger in Hannah's apartment. Eventually, however, Hannah's obsession with the past collides with Tariq's complicated family history. Tariq soon finds that the hatred and xenophobia that drove French complicity with Nazi Germany and the settling of Algeria have not evaporated but taken on more subtle manifestations. Narrated in the first person from both Hannah's and Tariq's perspectives, this is a briskly told and engaging novel that sets us in the bustling streets of mid-2000s Paris. However, the prose is workmanlike, even dull at times, never rising to the lyrical heights of books whose subject matter this shares. The comparison might be unfair, but it's hard not to recall novels like Sebald's gorgeous Austerlitz when reading this novel, which suffers for the comparison. Tariq's and Hannah's voices are occasionally unconvincing. Taking Tariq as a hard-up teenage Algerian runaway is difficult when, after running into a mysteriously familiar woman on the Paris Metro, he utters, "I felt she was meant for me as the man I could become, as the man I deep down already am—an older, better man beneath all the clumsy, unimportant stuff of being young and useless and being me." Most unfortunately, the novel's twists are easy to see coming. Still, this is an entertaining novel with memorable characters.
A fun romp through Paris and history, one that nevertheless makes us understand that the sins of the past are not truly past.Pub Date: Nov. 6, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-250-30565-7
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: Sept. 1, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
The story's very ambiguity steadily feeds its mysteriousness and power, and Danielewski's mastery of postmodernist and...
An amazingly intricate and ambitious first novel - ten years in the making - that puts an engrossing new spin on the traditional haunted-house tale.
Texts within texts, preceded by intriguing introductory material and followed by 150 pages of appendices and related "documents" and photographs, tell the story of a mysterious old house in a Virginia suburb inhabited by esteemed photographer-filmmaker Will Navidson, his companion Karen Green (an ex-fashion model), and their young children Daisy and Chad. The record of their experiences therein is preserved in Will's film The Davidson Record - which is the subject of an unpublished manuscript left behind by a (possibly insane) old man, Frank Zampano - which falls into the possession of Johnny Truant, a drifter who has survived an abusive childhood and the perverse possessiveness of his mad mother (who is institutionalized). As Johnny reads Zampano's manuscript, he adds his own (autobiographical) annotations to the scholarly ones that already adorn and clutter the text (a trick perhaps influenced by David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest) - and begins experiencing panic attacks and episodes of disorientation that echo with ominous precision the content of Davidson's film (their house's interior proves, "impossibly," to be larger than its exterior; previously unnoticed doors and corridors extend inward inexplicably, and swallow up or traumatize all who dare to "explore" their recesses). Danielewski skillfully manipulates the reader's expectations and fears, employing ingeniously skewed typography, and throwing out hints that the house's apparent malevolence may be related to the history of the Jamestown colony, or to Davidson's Pulitzer Prize-winning photograph of a dying Vietnamese child stalked by a waiting vulture. Or, as "some critics [have suggested,] the house's mutations reflect the psychology of anyone who enters it."
The story's very ambiguity steadily feeds its mysteriousness and power, and Danielewski's mastery of postmodernist and cinema-derived rhetoric up the ante continuously, and stunningly. One of the most impressive excursions into the supernatural in many a year.Pub Date: March 6, 2000
ISBN: 0-375-70376-4
Page Count: 704
Publisher: Pantheon
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2000
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