Leslie’s compliment that Kathryn’s work is “lined with silken sentences” holds true for Naslund (Adam and Eve, 2010)....
Despite a subtitle that clearly refers to James Joyce, Virginia Woolf echoes far louder in this novel within a novel following one day in the life of a 60-ish author of a fictional biography about the 18th-century portraitist of Marie Antoinette.
In contemporary Louisville, Ky., thrice divorced Kathryn Callaghan walks her newly completed manuscript over to Leslie, a musician and fellow writer with whom she’s been best friends since they grew up in Montgomery, Ala. African-American Leslie’s mother participated in the bus boycott. Leslie has recently moved to Louisville, and soon, Kathryn introduces her to another dear friend Daisy. Walking with her husband, Daisy feels a sense of danger when she notices a car drive by. Kathryn goes home and thinks about her beloved gay son, Humphrey, now living abroad, safe from his dangerous former lover. In the morning, Kathryn takes a walk with Humphrey’s father, Peter, her second husband. She thinks some more about her life, connecting deep emotions to literary references. She spends her day partially preparing for a possible visit from a potential new love interest, talking with her friends and contemplating her life in literary terms. Meanwhile, Leslie, along with the reader, is reading Kathryn’s first-person novel about Elisabeth Vigée Le Brun, a fiction also heavily invested in analyzing what it is to be an artist. Kathryn’s somewhat stiff prose describes Elisabeth’s early childhood as an artistic prodigy, her difficulties after her father’s death, her unhappy marriage, her fortuitous meeting with Marie Antoinette, whom she defends as misunderstood, not unlike Naslund in her 2006 historical novel Abundance. Like Kathryn, Elisabeth’s love life never mattered as much as her art. But while Elisabeth and her only daughter became estranged before the daughter’s untimely death, Kathryn proves herself willing to go to any lengths to protect her perfect son.
Leslie’s compliment that Kathryn’s work is “lined with silken sentences” holds true for Naslund (Adam and Eve, 2010). Nevertheless, the tone of literary high-mindedness and self-importance grows wearing after a while.Pub Date: Sept. 17, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-06-157932-5
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: July 6, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 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
Suspenseful, full of incident, and not obviously necessary.
Atwood goes back to Gilead.
The Handmaid’s Tale (1985), consistently regarded as a masterpiece of 20th-century literature, has gained new attention in recent years with the success of the Hulu series as well as fresh appreciation from readers who feel like this story has new relevance in America’s current political climate. Atwood herself has spoken about how news headlines have made her dystopian fiction seem eerily plausible, and it’s not difficult to imagine her wanting to revisit Gilead as the TV show has sped past where her narrative ended. Like the novel that preceded it, this sequel is presented as found documents—first-person accounts of life inside a misogynistic theocracy from three informants. There is Agnes Jemima, a girl who rejects the marriage her family arranges for her but still has faith in God and Gilead. There’s Daisy, who learns on her 16th birthday that her whole life has been a lie. And there's Aunt Lydia, the woman responsible for turning women into Handmaids. This approach gives readers insight into different aspects of life inside and outside Gilead, but it also leads to a book that sometimes feels overstuffed. The Handmaid’s Tale combined exquisite lyricism with a powerful sense of urgency, as if a thoughtful, perceptive woman was racing against time to give witness to her experience. That narrator hinted at more than she said; Atwood seemed to trust readers to fill in the gaps. This dynamic created an atmosphere of intimacy. However curious we might be about Gilead and the resistance operating outside that country, what we learn here is that what Atwood left unsaid in the first novel generated more horror and outrage than explicit detail can. And the more we get to know Agnes, Daisy, and Aunt Lydia, the less convincing they become. It’s hard, of course, to compete with a beloved classic, so maybe the best way to read this new book is to forget about The Handmaid’s Tale and enjoy it as an artful feminist thriller.
Suspenseful, full of incident, and not obviously necessary.Pub Date: Sept. 10, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-385-54378-1
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Nan A. Talese
Review Posted Online: Sept. 3, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2019
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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