The weather and Paris are the main attractions here, not the people.
A novel of Paris, family secrets, and catastrophic weather, from Franco-British author de Rosnay.
In Paris, the severity of flooding is traditionally measured by how close the waters of the Seine come to submerging the statue of a colonial soldier near the Pont de l’Alma. In de Rosnay’s (Manderley Forever, 2017, etc.) latest novel, the river rises to the statue’s waist and beyond, disrupting the weekend plans of the Malegarde family. Paul, an eminent arborist; his wife, Lauren, an American who toured Europe in the 1970s with her sister, Candice, and never left; their son, Linden, a world-renowned photographer; and daughter, Tilia, a not-so-renowned painter, meet at a hotel to celebrate Paul’s 70th birthday. Rain has been unusually constant even for January (presumably 2018). Linden, whose perspective dominates, is genteelly estranged from his parents and sister. His mother could never accept his gayness, which is why he left his father’s ancestral village to spend his adolescence living with Tante Candice in her 15th arrondissement apartment. Paul always reserved his most fervent emotions for trees. He suffers a stroke at his birthday dinner and is hospitalized. In view of his saintliness, it seems excessive for de Rosnay to silence him this way, with occasional cryptic diary entries and a baffling obsession with David Bowie as the only clues to his character. The family reunion is further complicated when Lauren develops pneumonia, the trauma underlying Tilia’s hospital phobia surfaces, her drunken husband comes to town, and the tragedy of Candice’s last days is revealed. The evocation of Paris is worthy of Modiano, and de Rosnay’s projection of the city’s worst deluge since 1910 is not only horrifying, but timely after the actual Seine floods of January 2018. However, the novel is long on rumination and summary, short on dialogue and forward momentum. The timing of the personal revelations seems arbitrary or, at best, anticlimactic.
The weather and Paris are the main attractions here, not the people.Pub Date: Oct. 23, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-250-20001-3
Page Count: 240
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: July 30, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2018
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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