“Das war es denn wohl. That takes care of that.” An overstuffed masterwork of late European modernism by German writer Johnson (1934-1984).
Hailed by Günter Grass as the most significant East German writer, Johnson left his homeland in 1959, dying at the age of 49 in England. From 1966 to 1968, though, he lived in New York, where he wrote the tetralogy called Jahrestage. Likened to Joyce’s Ulysses, it’s really a kind of Joseph Cornell box in words, a vast montage stretching from August 1967 to August 1968. The narrator, Gesine Cresspahl, lives in self-exile on the Upper West Side, working as a translator, trying to raise a daughter, Marie, by herself. Gesine is too young to have been complicit in the crimes of the Third Reich, but she saw them unfold, enabled by those who stood by, some of whose uniforms have merely changed colors in the years since the war ended even as other things have remained the same. The Levy’s Jewish rye ads on the New York subway, for instance, bear ominous signs of old: “There tend to be swastikas drawn on these posters,” remarks Gesine after reflecting on both a moment of wartime history and the opening of baseball season. “It’s true that they aren’t drawn correctly…but tonight I saw one more of them than I did this morning.” Past feeds into present and flows backward as Gesine travels in time and space to places like New Orleans and San Francisco in a time of torment. She sighs, “This summer is over, it’s now our future past, that’s what we can expect from life.” Her diary—which is to say, Johnson’s nearly 2,000-page novel—touches on Vietnam, World War II, postwar Eastern Europe, the inhumane conditions of that New York subway system and the humanity of its riders ("Marie was always given a greater amount of breathing room than she needed”), the triumph of despair, and countless other topics.
A rich book to be read slowly and thoughtfully, from a writer too little known today.Pub Date: Oct. 16, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-68137-203-7
Page Count: 1720
Publisher: New York Review Books
Review Posted Online: Aug. 21, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2018
Categories: HISTORICAL FICTION | FAMILY LIFE & FRIENDSHIP
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PERSPECTIVES
Named for an imperfectly worded fortune cookie, Hoover's (It Ends with Us, 2016, etc.) latest compares a woman’s relationship with her husband before and after she finds out she’s infertile.
Quinn meets her future husband, Graham, in front of her soon-to-be-ex-fiance’s apartment, where Graham is about to confront him for having an affair with his girlfriend. A few years later, they are happily married but struggling to conceive. The “then and now” format—with alternating chapters moving back and forth in time—allows a hopeful romance to blossom within a dark but relatable dilemma. Back then, Quinn’s bad breakup leads her to the love of her life. In the now, she’s exhausted a laundry list of fertility options, from IVF treatments to adoption, and the silver lining is harder to find. Quinn’s bad relationship with her wealthy mother also prevents her from asking for more money to throw at the problem. But just when Quinn’s narrative starts to sound like she’s writing a long Facebook rant about her struggles, she reveals the larger issue: Ever since she and Graham have been trying to have a baby, intimacy has become a chore, and she doesn’t know how to tell him. Instead, she hopes the contents of a mystery box she’s kept since their wedding day will help her decide their fate. With a few well-timed silences, Hoover turns the fairly common problem of infertility into the more universal problem of poor communication. Graham and Quinn may or may not become parents, but if they don’t talk about their feelings, they won’t remain a couple, either.
Finding positivity in negative pregnancy-test results, this depiction of a marriage in crisis is nearly perfect.Pub Date: July 17, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-5011-7159-8
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Atria
Review Posted Online: May 1, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2018
Categories: FAMILY LIFE & FRIENDSHIP
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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. 20, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2014
Categories: HISTORICAL FICTION | FAMILY LIFE & FRIENDSHIP
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