Companion novel to Hegi’s Oprah-anointed Stones from the River (1994, etc.): an ambitious, multigenerational story about identity, fate, and the dark side of seemingly benign visions that dutifully plods through the years, detailing as it goes along the schematic lives of the Blau family held hostage to the Wasserburg, a once grand apartment building. Thirteen-year-old Stefan Blau runs away from Germany in 1894 and winds up in Lake Winnipesaukee, New Hampshire. There, he opens a restaurant and dreams of building a splendid apartment house on the lake shore (Wasserburg means —water fortress—). The place is built, but Stefan’s first and second wives die in childbirth, leaving him visionary Greta and moody Tobias to rear. Stefan decides to send for his old friend Helene; she will be wife number three and raise his children, though he is determined to have no more. Angered by being used, Helene tricks Stefan into impregnating her and thereby produces Robert. By the 1950s, the Wasserburg is famous for its splendor, filled with a colorful assortment of people as well as Blau family members, and seemingly destined to last forever. But of course it won’t and, for plot purposes, can’t. From childhood on, Emma Blau, Robert’s daughter, has felt she was —the center of the house,” holding it together—an impression that leads her to deceive her family, defraud her brother, have a futile affair, and bear an illegitimate son while she struggles to save the building from its inevitable ruin as money runs out and the structure deteriorates. She (unconvincingly) comes to her senses on the last page of a dull, lifeless tale whose characters are as much in thrall to the plot as the Blaus are to the Wasserburg. Hegi seems to be going through the motions here, aspiring to profundity no doubt but achieving only a tired gothic reprise of hubris and folly.
Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2000
ISBN: 0-684-82997-5
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 1999
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Barenbaum has an eye for visual detail, but her story bogs down in sentiment, overplotting, and lecturing.
A young Jewish physicist in 1914 Russia wants to photograph a solar eclipse to prove Einstein’s theory of relativity while his sister, a doctor, struggles to ensure their survival.
Readers not steeped in physics may not be aware that a British astronomer proved Einstein’s theory after a 1919 solar eclipse. In Barenbaum’s first novel, a historical thriller about physics and the travail of Russian Jews, fictional physicist Vanya lives with his sister, Miri, and their grandmother Baba in Kovno, where anti-Semitic violence erupts regularly. Vanya has been promised a position at Harvard and a life in America for his family if he can prove Einstein’s theory with equations and photos of the coming eclipse. On the eve of war, Miri’s fiance, Yuri, secretly agrees to enlist for military duty in exchange for Miri’s promotion to surgeon at the hospital where he’s trained her. To escape an influential university colleague itching to appropriate his research, Vanya also enlists, heading off with Yuri to Riga, where he hopes to join an American physicist bringing the necessary camera to photograph the eclipse. Meanwhile, as the noose tightens around the Jewish community in Kovno, Mira and Baba escape with the help of Sasha, a Jewish soldier Miri has met under harrowing circumstances. Baba heads to St. Petersburg while Miri and Sasha set off to find Yuri and Vanya. Unbeknownst to Miri, the two have left Riga searching for the elusive American. The siblings separately face multiplying crises that begin to run together—several train incidents, several knife incidents, etc. Vanya unexpectedly bonds with Yuri while Miri, no surprise, is inescapably drawn to passionate, valiant Sasha. Too bad for her because Yuri’s careful self-control is misleading. In fact, while Miri and Vanya are annoyingly gifted as well as earnestly moral and Miri’s darling Sasha is typically dashing and heroic, Yuri evolves into Barenbaum’s one fully developed character, heartbreakingly full of human contradictions.
Barenbaum has an eye for visual detail, but her story bogs down in sentiment, overplotting, and lecturing.Pub Date: May 14, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-5387-4627-1
Page Count: 464
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Review Posted Online: Feb. 17, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2019
BOOK REVIEW
A memorable portrait of a people at war—a war that has long demanded recounting from an Ethiopian point of view.
An action-filled historical novel by Ethiopian American writer Mengiste (Beneath the Lion’s Gaze, 2010).
The Italians who invaded Ethiopia in 1935 under the orders of the man whom the conquered people insist on calling, in quiet resistance, Mussoloni came aching to avenge a loss they had suffered 40 years earlier. They might have remembered how fiercely the Ethiopians fought. Certainly the protagonist of Mengiste’s story, a young woman named Hirut, does. In a brief prologue, we find her returning to the capital, where she has not been for decades, in 1974, in order to find an audience with the emperor, Haile Selassie, who is just about to be overthrown. She has a mysterious box, inside of which, Mengiste memorably writes, “are the many dead that insist on resurrection.” The box comes from the war nearly 40 years earlier, and it is an artifact full of meaning. Hirut was nothing if not resourceful back then: A servant in a wealthy household, she becomes a field nurse, but as the war deepens, she takes up arms and becomes a fighter herself, “the brave guard of the Shadow King”—the Shadow King being a villager who bore a reasonable enough resemblance to the emperor, who has gone into hiding, to be dressed like him, taught his mannerisms, and sent out in public in order to rally the dispirited Ethiopian people. "There are oaths that hold this world together,” Mengiste writes, “promises that cannot be left undone or unfulfilled.” Such is the oath that the emperor broke by fleeing the fight. Mengiste is a master of characterization, and her characters reveal just who they are by their actions; always of interest to watch is the Italian colonel Carlo Fucelli, who is determined to win glory for himself, and a soldato named Ettore Navarra, who has learned Amharic and wants nothing more than to live a quiet life, preferably with Hirut by his side. Hirut herself is well rounded and thoroughly fascinating—and not a person to be crossed.
A memorable portrait of a people at war—a war that has long demanded recounting from an Ethiopian point of view.Pub Date: Sept. 24, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-393-08356-9
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: June 30, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2019
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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