A small treasure, from the author of the wonderful romantic comedy Addition (2009).
Spanning World War II to 9/11, Australian novelist Jordan delivers a witty and wise family saga.
The novel begins in 1939 with Kip Westaway, a 15-year-old resident of a working-class Melbourne suburb. His father has recently died (having fallen, drunk, off a trolley car); they’ve had to take in a boarder; Kip has quit school to do odd jobs for the furniture shop next door. Kip goes about his day: a scolding from his sour mother, Jean, the usual jousting with his twin brother, Francis, a bloody knee thanks to the neighborhood hoodlums, comfort from his beloved older sister Connie, a brief chat with the most beautiful girl in Melbourne, the gift of a shilling from his kindhearted employer, Mr. Hustings—inconsequential events that begin to resonate with each ensuing chapter. Sixty years later, we find Kip’s daughter Stanzi in her office, preparing to frame her dad’s lucky shilling, until it disappears; perhaps her kleptomaniac client is to blame. This is followed by Jack’s story: The only son of Mr. Hustings, Jack has just returned from a rural sheep station and is at a crossroads: He wants to go back to the country but feels the pressure to enlist and fight the Nazis, then he sees Connie from his bedroom window and can think of nothing else. Skipping back and forth in time, from one character to another, Jordan builds a gorgeously layered story examining the innocent choices that shape a life, a family: the failures of favored son Francis, Kip’s grandson Alec’s fateful discovery, his mother Charlotte’s unplanned pregnancy, Jean’s heartbreaking maternal advice. Jordan closes the novel with Connie’s chapter. By now, everyone’s fate is known, but the love story between Connie and Jack—inspired by the novel's cover, a striking archival photo of a woman being hoisted up to a train window to kiss a departing soldier—is so romantically tragic, it feels that the story’s really been about them all along.
A small treasure, from the author of the wonderful romantic comedy Addition (2009).Pub Date: Sept. 10, 2013
ISBN: 978-1-92192-283-1
Page Count: 254
Publisher: Text
Review Posted Online: July 6, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2013
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
The story's very ambiguity steadily feeds its mysteriousness and power, and Danielewski's mastery of postmodernist and...
An amazingly intricate and ambitious first novel - ten years in the making - that puts an engrossing new spin on the traditional haunted-house tale.
Texts within texts, preceded by intriguing introductory material and followed by 150 pages of appendices and related "documents" and photographs, tell the story of a mysterious old house in a Virginia suburb inhabited by esteemed photographer-filmmaker Will Navidson, his companion Karen Green (an ex-fashion model), and their young children Daisy and Chad. The record of their experiences therein is preserved in Will's film The Davidson Record - which is the subject of an unpublished manuscript left behind by a (possibly insane) old man, Frank Zampano - which falls into the possession of Johnny Truant, a drifter who has survived an abusive childhood and the perverse possessiveness of his mad mother (who is institutionalized). As Johnny reads Zampano's manuscript, he adds his own (autobiographical) annotations to the scholarly ones that already adorn and clutter the text (a trick perhaps influenced by David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest) - and begins experiencing panic attacks and episodes of disorientation that echo with ominous precision the content of Davidson's film (their house's interior proves, "impossibly," to be larger than its exterior; previously unnoticed doors and corridors extend inward inexplicably, and swallow up or traumatize all who dare to "explore" their recesses). Danielewski skillfully manipulates the reader's expectations and fears, employing ingeniously skewed typography, and throwing out hints that the house's apparent malevolence may be related to the history of the Jamestown colony, or to Davidson's Pulitzer Prize-winning photograph of a dying Vietnamese child stalked by a waiting vulture. Or, as "some critics [have suggested,] the house's mutations reflect the psychology of anyone who enters it."
The story's very ambiguity steadily feeds its mysteriousness and power, and Danielewski's mastery of postmodernist and cinema-derived rhetoric up the ante continuously, and stunningly. One of the most impressive excursions into the supernatural in many a year.Pub Date: March 6, 2000
ISBN: 0-375-70376-4
Page Count: 704
Publisher: Pantheon
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2000
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