Still, within the confines of its father-daughter story, a powerful essay on the instinct to both keep and reveal family...
A woman is drawn inexorably deeper into her father’s past as a World War II refugee in Redel’s second novel.
Sara Leader, a New York professor, has a substantial to-do list for the summer of 2003: She needs to complete the bottomless pile of paperwork required to adopt a baby from overseas, get moving on a translation of books and papers by influential German philosopher Walter Benjamin and keep a watchful eye on her elderly father, Richard, a Belgian-born Jew who narrowly escaped the death camps. Sara’s awareness of her father’s past is vague at best; Richard (born Itzak Lejdel) has successfully repelled his daughter’s attempts to learn more about his passage into the U.S. The reader is in on the secret, though: Sara’s story is interspersed with the letters Itzak wrote to First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt in September 1940, when he was trapped in U.S. docks aboard a European refugee ship, the Quanza. Amid his descriptions of his first love, his broken-up family and his narrow escape from German-occupied Europe, he emerges as a tender and bright 17-year-old who made more sacrifices than he ever confessed to his daughter. There are strong parallels between Sara’s father and Walter Benjamin, who killed himself in September 1940, despairing of crossing the French-Spanish border and escaping the Nazis, but Redel (Loverboy, 2001) doesn’t oversell that connection, nor does this story become a simplistic tale of father-daughter bonding. Instead, its best moments contain lucid observations about the struggle to uncover family secrets, and to understand the depths of self-hatred and fear that war generates. Other portions of the novel are less convincing: Sara’s relationship with a married man (and her increasing attraction to another suitor) is thinly depicted, as is her relationship with her best friend, who mechanically dispenses tough love at every turn.
Still, within the confines of its father-daughter story, a powerful essay on the instinct to both keep and reveal family secrets.Pub Date: April 30, 2007
ISBN: 1-58243-366-6
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Counterpoint
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2007
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
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.
Four men who meet as college roommates move to New York and spend the next three decades gaining renown in their professions—as an architect, painter, actor and lawyer—and struggling with demons in their intertwined personal lives.
Yanagihara (The People in the Trees, 2013) takes the still-bold leap of writing about characters who don’t share her background; in addition to being male, JB is African-American, Malcolm has a black father and white mother, Willem is white, and “Jude’s race was undetermined”—deserted at birth, he was raised in a monastery and had an unspeakably traumatic childhood that’s revealed slowly over the course of the book. Two of them are gay, one straight and one bisexual. There isn’t a single significant female character, and for a long novel, there isn’t much plot. There aren’t even many markers of what’s happening in the outside world; Jude moves to a loft in SoHo as a young man, but we don’t see the neighborhood change from gritty artists’ enclave to glitzy tourist destination. What we get instead is an intensely interior look at the friends’ psyches and relationships, and it’s utterly enthralling. The four men think about work and creativity and success and failure; they cook for each other, compete with each other and jostle for each other’s affection. JB bases his entire artistic career on painting portraits of his friends, while Malcolm takes care of them by designing their apartments and houses. When Jude, as an adult, is adopted by his favorite Harvard law professor, his friends join him for Thanksgiving in Cambridge every year. And when Willem becomes a movie star, they all bask in his glow. Eventually, the tone darkens and the story narrows to focus on Jude as the pain of his past cuts deep into his carefully constructed life.
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.Pub Date: March 10, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-385-53925-8
Page Count: 720
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Dec. 21, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2015
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