Elegant to a fault. Lacking in heart.
A tale of guilt and redemption set in 1920s Alabama.
This is the story of Roscoe T Martin and the death that transforms his life. An electrician by trade, Roscoe is frustrated by life on the failing farm his wife inherited from her father. Roscoe decides that he can save the farm—and himself—by running power lines to his family’s property and its machinery. The farm does prosper for a time, but the reader knows from the novel’s opening line that this scheme will end in tragedy: “The electrical transformers that would one day kill George Haskin sat high on a pole about ten yards off the northeast corner of the farm where Roscoe T Martin lived with his family.” Roscoe goes to prison, where he examines his life as he waits for parole. As the narrative moves back and forth in time, Roscoe and his wife, Marie, share their perspectives on the past. That their recollections and viewpoints often diverge adds depth to this novel. Both are eloquent and acutely self-aware. This makes for some prose so lovely that it strains credulity. In a moment of reflection, Marie thinks, “She was losing herself, she knew, sinking into something untenable, a deep well with madness at its bottom. The feel of it—slippery, cool, damp—hung on her like the wash she no longer helped Moa hang on the line, rung to wrinkles and still dripping.” Roscoe’s jailhouse philosophizing also beggars belief, but more troubling is his lack of regard for Wilson, the farm manager tried and convicted as an accomplice and a man who, as an African-American, faces much harder punishment than Roscoe. This makes the beneficence and forgiveness Wilson and his family extend to Roscoe almost unbearable, and the ending is hobbled by complex machinations that would have been more at home in a Greek tragedy or a Restoration comedy.
Elegant to a fault. Lacking in heart.Pub Date: March 1, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-5011-1249-2
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: Dec. 20, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2016
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
A modern day fable, with modern implications in a deceiving simplicity, by the author of Dickens. Dali and Others (Reynal & Hitchcock, p. 138), whose critical brilliance is well adapted to this type of satire. This tells of the revolt on a farm, against humans, when the pigs take over the intellectual superiority, training the horses, cows, sheep, etc., into acknowledging their greatness. The first hints come with the reading out of a pig who instigated the building of a windmill, so that the electric power would be theirs, the idea taken over by Napoleon who becomes topman with no maybes about it. Napoleon trains the young puppies to be his guards, dickers with humans, gradually instigates a reign of terror, and breaks the final commandment against any animal walking on two legs. The old faithful followers find themselves no better off for food and work than they were when man ruled them, learn their final disgrace when they see Napoleon and Squealer carousing with their enemies... A basic statement of the evils of dictatorship in that it not only corrupts the leaders, but deadens the intelligence and awareness of those led so that tyranny is inevitable. Mr. Orwell's animals exist in their own right, with a narrative as individual as it is apt in political parody.
Pub Date: Aug. 26, 1946
ISBN: 0452277507
Page Count: 114
Publisher: Harcourt, Brace
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1946
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