Thoughtful, tender and quite gripping, even for readers unfamiliar with the historical events the author sensitively...
A fictional portrait of ballerina Tanaquil Le Clercq’s struggle with polio—and George Balanchine.
As O’Connor’s main narrative opens in the summer of 1956, the New York City Ballet is on tour in Copenhagen when 27-year-old Tanny (as everyone calls her) is stricken with polio. George nurses her devotedly and pushes her almost as hard in physical therapy as he did in rehearsal, but they must face the fact that she will never walk or dance again, while his life continues to be consumed by ballet. Tanny, his fifth wife, is well aware of George’s habit of marrying his favorite ballerina, making great dances for her, then moving on to new inspiration. The balance of the novel traces the evolution of their complicated relationship: during the remaining 13 years of their marriage, when she tells herself “the other women mean nothing” and are merely fodder for his choreography; through the crisis sparked by his obsession with teenage Suzanne Farrell, which destabilizes NYCB and finally leads to their divorce; and in later years, when they resume a friendship that still has moments of jealousy and anger, but is founded on enduring love and long intimacy. Jerome Robbins, Diana Adams and Maria Tallchief are among the other real-life figures vividly depicted in the first-person narration O’Connor (A Company of Three, 2003, etc.) crafts for Tanny, but the center of attention is always George, captured in all his intermingled charm, cruelty and utter devotion to his muse—whoever she may be. We believe Tanny’s assertion that she holds a special place in his heart, but we sense that she knows there are special places there for all his women. Tanny has another lover later in life, and she finds fulfilling work writing books and coaching dancers; this is not a novel about victimization or the malevolence of genius, but rather about the painful accommodations all of us make for the things and people we love.
Thoughtful, tender and quite gripping, even for readers unfamiliar with the historical events the author sensitively reimagines.Pub Date: May 8, 2012
ISBN: 978-1-4516-5538-4
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: Feb. 19, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2012
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
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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