Vivid historical background wasted on unengaging fiction.
Desrochers’ debut follows a spirited young woman from a grim charity hospital in 17th-century Paris to the equally challenging Canadian wilderness.
Snatched from her parents by a law that forbids begging on the city streets, the best Laure Beauséjour can hope for as an inmate of Salpêtrière Hospital is that her nimble fingers will get her a job with a seamstress, where she can assess single men for their marriageability. She has no interest in the cloistered life, unlike her pious friend Madeleine, who aspires only to become one of the nuns who oversee the hospital’s indigent women with varying degrees of severity. But when Laure’s ill-judged letter to the king complaining of their treatment results in her being sent to Canada, she persuades Madeleine to join her in the contingent of unruly women destined to atone for their sins by marrying settlers and providing population for New France. The improbable scene in which Madeleine decides to cast her lot with Laure is only one instance of the awkward tone and sketchy motivations that indicate a beginning novelist throughout this oddly conceived and structured narrative. With nearly half the text devoted to Laure’s experiences in Paris and the voyage to the New World, the author fails to provide sufficient time and emotional weight for the ordeal in the Canadian wilderness, where the protagonist reluctantly marries an odious fur trader but finds herself drawn to one of the natives the French scornfully call Savages. Desrochers, who drew her fictional inspiration from her research for a masters’ thesis at York University on the subject of female immigration, certainly conveys the bleak conditions endured by French settlers, particularly in the stark depiction of Laure facing starvation during her first Canadian winter. But she fails to bring to life any of the characters other than willful Laure, and her self-absorbed heroine is hard to like.
Vivid historical background wasted on unengaging fiction.Pub Date: Aug. 6, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-393-07337-9
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: July 21, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2012
A deeply satisfying novel, both sensuously vivid and remarkably poignant.
Norwegian novelist Jacobsen folds a quietly powerful coming-of-age story into a rendition of daily life on one of Norway’s rural islands a hundred years ago in a novel that was shortlisted for the 2017 Man Booker International Prize.
Ingrid Barrøy, her father, Hans, mother, Maria, grandfather Martin, and slightly addled aunt Barbro are the owners and sole inhabitants of Barrøy Island, one of numerous small family-owned islands in an area of Norway barely touched by the outside world. The novel follows Ingrid from age 3 through a carefree early childhood of endless small chores, simple pleasures, and unquestioned familial love into her more ambivalent adolescence attending school off the island and becoming aware of the outside world, then finally into young womanhood when she must make difficult choices. Readers will share Ingrid’s adoration of her father, whose sense of responsibility conflicts with his romantic nature. He adores Maria, despite what he calls her “la-di-da” ways, and is devoted to Ingrid. Twice he finds work on the mainland for his sister, Barbro, but, afraid she’ll be unhappy, he brings her home both times. Rooted to the land where he farms and tied to the sea where he fishes, Hans struggles to maintain his family’s hardscrabble existence on an island where every repair is a struggle against the elements. But his efforts are Sisyphean. Life as a Barrøy on Barrøy remains precarious. Changes do occur in men’s and women’s roles, reflected in part by who gets a literal chair to sit on at meals, while world crises—a war, Sweden’s financial troubles—have unexpected impact. Yet the drama here occurs in small increments, season by season, following nature’s rhythm through deaths and births, moments of joy and deep sorrow. The translator’s decision to use roughly translated phrases in conversation—i.e., “Tha’s goen’ nohvar” for "You’re going nowhere")—slows the reading down at first but ends up drawing readers more deeply into the world of Barrøy and its prickly, intensely alive inhabitants.
A deeply satisfying novel, both sensuously vivid and remarkably poignant.Pub Date: April 7, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-77196-319-0
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Biblioasis
Review Posted Online: Jan. 12, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2020
In Clavell's last whopper, Tai-pan, the hero became tai-pan (supreme ruler) of Hong Kong following England's victory in the first Opium War. Clavell's new hero, John Blackthorne, a giant Englishman, arrives in 17th century Japan in search of riches and becomes the right arm of the warlord Toranaga who is even more powerful than the Emperor. Superhumanly self-confident (and so sexually overendowed that the ladies who bathe him can die content at having seen the world's most sublime member), Blackthorne attempts to break Portugal's hold on Japan and encourage trade with Elizabeth I's merchants. He is a barbarian not only to the Japanese but also to Portuguese Catholics, who want him dispatched to a non-papist hell. The novel begins on a note of maelstrom-and-tempest ("'Piss on you, storm!' Blackthorne raged. 'Get your dung-eating hands off my ship!'") and teems for about 900 pages of relentless lopped heads, severed torsos, assassins, intrigue, war, tragic love, over-refined sex, excrement, torture, high honor, ritual suicide, hot baths and breathless haikus. As in Tai-pan, the carefully researched material on feudal Oriental money matters seems to he Clavell's real interest, along with the megalomania of personal and political power. After Blackthorne has saved Toranaga's life three times, he is elevated to samurai status, given a fief and made a chief defender of the empire. Meanwhile, his highborn Japanese love (a Catholic convert and adulteress) teaches him "inner harmony" as he grows ever more Eastern. With Toranaga as shogun (military dictator), the book ends with the open possibility of a forthcoming sequel. Engrossing, predictable and surely sellable.
Pub Date: June 23, 1975
ISBN: 0385343248
Page Count: 998
Publisher: Atheneum
Review Posted Online: Sept. 21, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 1975
BOOK TO SCREEN
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