When describing her life in India as an “endless disorderly feast,” Eleanor might well be describing One Last Look: rich,...
Moore’s (In the Cut, 1995, etc.) fictionalized journal, based on actual published diaries, of life among the Raj in the 1830s and ’40s depicts the convoluted relationship of the British to their Indian subjects.
Lady Eleanor accompanies her brother Henry to Calcutta when he is appointed Governor-General to act as his official hostess (and secret incestuous lover). Also in the household are Eleanor’s younger sister Harriet, their military-minded cousin Lafayette, and a slew of pets and domestic servants. At first, Eleanor, a sensualist at heart, is overcome by a kind of lassitude, a combination of the heat and the strangeness of the new life that throws her into contact not only with Indians but with middle-class Brits for the first time. In contrast, Harriet, always considered a bit dim in their high-born British world, blossoms into a strong, insightful, independent woman, immersing herself in native customs and setting up a laboratory to study the flora and fauna. Gradually, as Eleanor becomes deeply attached to her servants and their world, she begins to see the English role in India in a more complex light. When Henry, a conventional prig despite his sexual proclivities, doesn’t follow Lafayette’s advice about which local ruler to back in Afghanistan, he loses control of the region at the cost of thousands of lives. The scandal of Harriet’s Indian male servant’s gunshot death in her bedroom is covered up, but Harriet’s unspoken intimacy with him is a far greater scandal, even in the eyes of Lafayette, who himself has fathered a half-caste child. When Henry’s term is over (his disgrace over Afghanistan relieved by his new appointment to be First Lord of the Admiralty), Eleanor and Harriet, as dependent sisters, must return to England with their brother. Back on English soil, Harriet withers away while Eleanor (no longer enamored of Henry) survives with the help of her remaining Indian servant and opiates.
When describing her life in India as an “endless disorderly feast,” Eleanor might well be describing One Last Look: rich, lush, scattered, repetitive, and wonderfully satisfying.Pub Date: Oct. 6, 2003
ISBN: 0-679-45041-6
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2003
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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