A passionate tale of deep, mysterious Finland forests and complex moods in the music of Finnish composer Jean Sibelius, ably set in the fire and ice of WW II by historian/first-novelist Trotter (A Frozen Hell: The Russo-Finnish Winter War of 1939-40— not reviewed). Erich Ziegler, a promising young conductor whose career is interrupted by the Nazification of Germany's musical culture, first experiences the war on the frozen tundra near Murmansk. Rescued by his classical background from the front lines, he's drafted into military intelligence and sent to ferret out information from Finnish troops in the guise of a Wehrmacht liaison officer, but a chance sighting of Sibelius en route to his post quickly leads to friendship with the aging recluse. As a member of the composer's inner circle, Erich falls in love with a beautiful, enigmatic woman who is Sibelius's servant but whose forest ties have given her unusual abilities. The couple's relationship is interrupted when Erich allows pride to cloud his judgment during a command orchestra performance for Hitler, committing an act of defiance that lands him on the Russian front. There, he suffers severe shock from the battle conditions and is hospitalized, eventually returning to Finland at Sibelius's request. Although frustrated by the composer's refusal to acknowledge the existence of his long-awaited Eighth Symphony, Erich still prospers as his protÇgÇ; and after barely surviving the all-out Soviet assault on Finnish positions, he returns to the maestro's retreat to be given a solo performance of the work by the composer himself. But brutalized by the war and convinced that the score is about to be destroyed, he betrays both his host and the love of his forest maiden, running away to meet a tragic fate. Excessively melodramatic on occasion, but still a stunning evocation of Finnish landscapes, myth, and music, while the desperate conditions under which war was waged in northern Europe are brought savagely to life.
Pub Date: Feb. 18, 1993
ISBN: 0-525-93581-9
Page Count: 496
Publisher: Dutton
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 1992
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
Coelho's placebo has racked up impressive sales in Brazil and Europe. Americans should flock to it like gulls.
Coelho is a Brazilian writer with four books to his credit. Following Diary of a Magus (1992—not reviewed) came this book, published in Brazil in 1988: it's an interdenominational, transcendental, inspirational fable—in other words, a bag of wind.
The story is about a youth empowered to follow his dream. Santiago is an Andalusian shepherd boy who learns through a dream of a treasure in the Egyptian pyramids. An old man, the king of Salem, the first of various spiritual guides, tells the boy that he has discovered his destiny: "to realize one's destiny is a person's only real obligation." So Santiago sells his sheep, sails to Tangier, is tricked out of his money, regains it through hard work, crosses the desert with a caravan, stops at an oasis long enough to fall in love, escapes from warring tribesmen by performing a miracle, reaches the pyramids, and eventually gets both the gold and the girl. Along the way he meets an Englishman who describes the Soul of the World; the desert woman Fatima, who teaches him the Language of the World; and an alchemist who says, "Listen to your heart" A message clings like ivy to every encounter; everyone, but everyone, has to put in their two cents' worth, from the crystal merchant to the camel driver ("concentrate always on the present, you'll be a happy man"). The absence of characterization and overall blandness suggest authorship by a committee of self-improvement pundits—a far cry from Saint- Exupery's The Little Prince: that flagship of the genre was a genuine charmer because it clearly derived from a quirky, individual sensibility.
Coelho's placebo has racked up impressive sales in Brazil and Europe. Americans should flock to it like gulls.Pub Date: July 1, 1993
ISBN: 0-06-250217-4
Page Count: 192
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1993
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
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