Katinka’s archival research is as suspenseful as Sashenka’s trials in this deft fiction debut.
Inspired by a true story, historian Montefiore (Young Stalin, 2007, etc.) turns novelist to profile a young revolutionary who leads an exemplary Marxist life until a romantic misadventure puts her in Stalin’s sights.
Sashenka, teenage daughter of a Jewish oil magnate, is exiting an exclusive prep school for daughters of the Russian nobility in 1916 when, instead of being picked up by her father’s chauffeur, she’s arrested by the Tsarist police, who have gotten wind of her subversive activities as “Comrade Snowfox.” After spending the night in jail, she’s interrogated by Captain Sagan, who releases her to her family. Uncle Mendel, Sashenka’s mentor in the Bolshevik movement, assigns her to turn Sagan into a double agent; Sagan has similar designs upon Sashenka. As these intrigues play out, the Tsar abdicates, and the Revolution ensues. Sagan dies in the rioting, and Sashenka becomes Lenin’s secretary. By 1939, she is a model Soviet matron, the wife of Vanya, a rising star in Stalin’s NKVD. When Uncle Joe himself crashes a soiree at her dacha, she’s intimidated, but relieved that the dictator seems taken with her children, Snowy and Carlo. Despite her communist scruples, Sashenka is drawn to impish younger man Benya Golden, a writer who seduces her with blandishments both verbal and physical. After Vanya bugs the lovers’ trysting places, he’s arrested by his former employers, taking Sashenka, Mendel and Benya down with him. Under torture, all confess to trumped-up conspiracy charges and disappear into the voracious maw of Stalin’s terror machine. Snowy and Carlo survive, spirited under false names to adoptive families by family friend Satinov. In 1994, a Russian oligarch engages fledgling historian Katinka to research the disappearance of his grandparents in 1939. Katinka soon learns that Satinov, now 94, holds the key to the enigma of her client’s origins, but Satinov challenges her to arrive at the solution independently—for reasons not clear until the well-tuned surprise ending.
Katinka’s archival research is as suspenseful as Sashenka’s trials in this deft fiction debut.Pub Date: Nov. 11, 2008
ISBN: 978-1-4165-9554-0
Page Count: 544
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2008
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
Tinny perhaps, but still a minutely rendered and impressively steady feminist vision of apocalypse.
The time is the not-so-distant future, when the US's spiraling social freedoms have finally called down a reaction, an Iranian-style repressive "monotheocracy" calling itself the Republic of Gilead—a Bible-thumping, racist, capital-punishing, and misogynistic rule that would do away with pleasure altogether were it not for one thing: that the Gileadan women, pure and true (as opposed to all the nonbelieving women, those who've ever been adulterous or married more than once), are found rarely fertile.
Thus are drafted a whole class of "handmaids," whose function is to bear the children of the elite, to be fecund or else (else being certain death, sent out to be toxic-waste removers on outlying islands). The narrative frame for Atwood's dystopian vision is the hopeless private testimony of one of these surrogate mothers, Offred ("of" plus the name of her male protector). Lying cradled by the body of the barren wife, being meanwhile serviced by the husband, Offred's "ceremony" must be successful—if she does not want to join the ranks of the other disappeared (which include her mother, her husband—dead—and small daughter, all taken away during the years of revolt). One Of her only human conduits is a gradually developing affair with her master's chauffeur—something that's balanced more than offset, though, by the master's hypocritically un-Puritan use of her as a kind of B-girl at private parties held by the ruling men in a spirit of nostalgia and lust. This latter relationship, edging into real need (the master's), is very effectively done; it highlights the handmaid's (read Everywoman's) eternal exploitation, profane or sacred ("We are two-legged wombs, that's all: sacred vessels, ambulatory chalices"). Atwood, to her credit, creates a chillingly specific, imaginable night-mare. The book is short on characterization—this is Atwood, never a warm writer, at her steeliest—and long on cynicism—it's got none of the human credibility of a work such as Walker Percy's Love In The Ruins. But the scariness is visceral, a world that's like a dangerous and even fatal grid, an electrified fence.
Tinny perhaps, but still a minutely rendered and impressively steady feminist vision of apocalypse.Pub Date: Feb. 17, 1985
ISBN: 038549081X
Page Count: -
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
Review Posted Online: Sept. 16, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 1985
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
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