An unflinching, nightmarish fable with plenty of smarts behind it.
A German family struggles for survival in the Venezuelan jungle after World War II, in a story thick with bloodshed and allegory.
Erich, the narrator of the second novel by Krol (Callisto, 2009), is a 16-year-old boy forced to grow up fast. His father died on the Russian front, and with no prospects in a decimated Nazi Germany, his mother opts to uproot Erich and his younger brother Zeppi and move to Venezuela. There she marries her brother-in-law Klaus. It’s purely a marriage of convenience (Klaus is a former SS officer eager to obscure his work in the concentration camps), and as if to punish the family for its inauthenticity, their plane crashes into a river deep in the jungle. They’re soon discovered by the Yayomi, a tribe that welcomes them thanks only to Gerhard Wentzler, a German researcher who’s been living with the natives while the Nazis laid waste to Europe. Wentzler soothes the Yayomi by saying the new arrivals are nonthreatening “dolphin people,” but, this being a story of culture clashes, the strategy doesn’t last long. Krol’s twist on lost-in-nature stories like Life of Pi and The Mosquito Coast is to emphasize Erich’s pubescent obsession with sex, manliness and authority, along with his immaturity (he clings to his dad’s Iron Cross, not to mention his anti-Semitism). That makes for a sometimes unseemly amount of detail about bodily functions, as Krol details the tribe’s bathroom behavior and Erich’s intimate relationship with a young native woman; moreover, Zeppi turns out to be a hermaphrodite, and terrifyingly bloodthirsty creatures lurk in the river. But Krol is admirably determined to explore the pure primal essence of each of his characters, and however off-putting some plot points might be, his writing is sharp, capturing the emotional zigzagging of his adolescent narrator without losing his grip on the plot. With the theme of anti-Semitism slowly becoming more amplified as the story moves along, Krol expertly turns his adventure story into a pointed commentary on the nature of tribal hatred.
An unflinching, nightmarish fable with plenty of smarts behind it.Pub Date: Nov. 17, 2009
ISBN: 978-0-06-167296-5
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Perennial/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2009
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
Miller makes Homer pertinent to women facing 21st-century monsters.
A retelling of ancient Greek lore gives exhilarating voice to a witch.
“Monsters are a boon for gods. Imagine all the prayers.” So says Circe, a sly, petulant, and finally commanding voice that narrates the entirety of Miller’s dazzling second novel. The writer returns to Homer, the wellspring that led her to an Orange Prize for The Song of Achilles (2012). This time, she dips into The Odyssey for the legend of Circe, a nymph who turns Odysseus’ crew of men into pigs. The novel, with its distinctive feminist tang, starts with the sentence: “When I was born, the name for what I was did not exist.” Readers will relish following the puzzle of this unpromising daughter of the sun god Helios and his wife, Perse, who had negligible use for their child. It takes banishment to the island Aeaea for Circe to sense her calling as a sorceress: “I will not be like a bird bred in a cage, I thought, too dull to fly even when the door stands open. I stepped into those woods and my life began.” This lonely, scorned figure learns herbs and potions, surrounds herself with lions, and, in a heart-stopping chapter, outwits the monster Scylla to propel Daedalus and his boat to safety. She makes lovers of Hermes and then two mortal men. She midwifes the birth of the Minotaur on Crete and performs her own C-section. And as she grows in power, she muses that “not even Odysseus could talk his way past [her] witchcraft. He had talked his way past the witch instead.” Circe’s fascination with mortals becomes the book’s marrow and delivers its thrilling ending. All the while, the supernatural sits intriguingly alongside “the tonic of ordinary things.” A few passages coil toward melodrama, and one inelegant line after a rape seems jarringly modern, but the spell holds fast. Expect Miller’s readership to mushroom like one of Circe’s spells.
Miller makes Homer pertinent to women facing 21st-century monsters.Pub Date: April 10, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-316-55634-7
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Jan. 22, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2018
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