Shrouded in sorrow and Scandinavian gloom and a central part of a masterwork of modernist literature.
The second volume in Undset’s tetralogy finds its eponymous hero battling one enemy and one moral quandary after another.
The time is the 1300s, when Norway’s king declares that his people are no longer to go out raiding as Vikings but instead are to settle down into peaceable occupations: “Men were supposed to believe, whether they liked it or not, that God would not tolerate anyone plundering a fellow Christian, even if he happened to be a foreigner.” Ask a Viking to make nice, though, and you’ve got a problem on your hands. Olav, having been an outlaw raider after killing a member of his betrothed’s family, now tries to settle down with Ingunn Steinfinnsdatter on his ancestral estate east of Oslo Fjord. It’s not an easy transition. Olav is on his way to being a good Christian, but even so the Viking is strong in him: “He was…aware that he was supposed to show remorse because the murder was considered a sin, even though he couldn’t understand why it was so sinful,” writes Undset of his original sin (but not his first killing, and not his last). In the second volume of the four devoted to Olav, we find him constantly wrestling with a conscience newly awakened by conversations with learned priests—all Catholic, naturally, considering the time, a matter that brought controversy to Undset when the novel was published in officially Lutheran Norway in 1925. He also wrestles with the presence of the son his wife bore to another man, whom Olav also killed; the boy is a constant reminder of her infidelity, even as one child after another of Olav’s is stillborn or dies soon after birth. Ingunn weakens and ages while Olav remains handsome and strong, though riven by doubt. A bonus in the story: As the volume winds to an end, Olav meets a kind fellow named Lavrans Bjørgulfssøn, who, readers may recall, is the father of the protagonist of Undset’s best-known novel, Kristin Lavransdatter.
Shrouded in sorrow and Scandinavian gloom and a central part of a masterwork of modernist literature.Pub Date: Oct. 5, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-5179-1160-7
Page Count: 280
Publisher: Univ. of Minnesota
Review Posted Online: July 27, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2021
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 welcome literary resurrection that deserves a place alongside Wright’s best-known work.
A falsely accused Black man goes into hiding in this masterful novella by Wright (1908-1960), finally published in full.
Written in 1941 and '42, between Wright’s classics Native Son and Black Boy, this short novel concerns Fred Daniels, a modest laborer who’s arrested by police officers and bullied into signing a false confession that he killed the residents of a house near where he was working. In a brief unsupervised moment, he escapes through a manhole and goes into hiding in a sewer. A series of allegorical, surrealistic set pieces ensues as Fred explores the nether reaches of a church, a real estate firm, and a jewelry store. Each stop is an opportunity for Wright to explore themes of hope, greed, and exploitation; the real estate firm, Wright notes, “collected hundreds of thousands of dollars in rent from poor colored folks.” But Fred’s deepening existential crisis and growing distance from society keep the scenes from feeling like potted commentaries. As he wallpapers his underground warren with cash, mocking and invalidating the currency, he registers a surrealistic but engrossing protest against divisive social norms. The novel, rejected by Wright’s publisher, has only appeared as a substantially truncated short story until now, without the opening setup and with a different ending. Wright's take on racial injustice seems to have unsettled his publisher: A note reveals that an editor found reading about Fred’s treatment by the police “unbearable.” That may explain why Wright, in an essay included here, says its focus on race is “rather muted,” emphasizing broader existential themes. Regardless, as an afterword by Wright’s grandson Malcolm attests, the story now serves as an allegory both of Wright (he moved to France, an “exile beyond the reach of Jim Crow and American bigotry”) and American life. Today, it resonates deeply as a story about race and the struggle to envision a different, better world.
A welcome literary resurrection that deserves a place alongside Wright’s best-known work.Pub Date: April 20, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-59853-676-8
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Library of America
Review Posted Online: March 16, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2021
BOOK TO SCREEN
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