Provocative ideas straitjacketed in an overdetermined plot.
Three grieving men’s odysseys fitfully interconnect in this latest meditation on loss, faith, and belonging from Martel (Beatrice and Virgil, 2010, etc.).
In December 1904, Tomás leaves Lisbon in a new car he hardly knows how to drive. Since the deaths a year ago of his servant lover, their young son, and his father, he has become obsessed with the 17th-century diary of a Portuguese priest stationed in Africa who wrote of making a special kind of crucifix that Tomás believes ended up in the high mountains of Portugal. After a long journey that makes vividly palpable the perils of early-20th-century motoring, he finds the crucifix, makes a dramatic pronouncement about it that reveals his personal fury at the god who robbed him of everyone he loved—and this first portion of the novel abruptly ends. Cut to New Year’s Eve 1938, as pathologist Eusebio Lozora, catching up on work at the hospital, receives an odd visit from his devoutly religious wife and an even odder one from a woman carrying a suitcase containing her dead husband’s body, on which she insists Eusebio immediately perform an autopsy. The autopsy’s outré results seem to have some link to the crucifix Tomás found, but rather than elucidating, Martel piles on more bizarre developments before once again chopping off his narrative with multiple dangling ends. Both of these sections are extremely readable, with strongly developed characters whose intriguing stories make it frustrating when they are truncated. This authorial strategy might be acceptable if the third section, set in 1981—which features human/animal interaction as provocative and moving as the one in Martel’s mega-selling Life of Pi (2001)—drew together these narrative strands in a way that made sense of the novel’s spiritual and artistic themes. Instead, we get by-the-numbers connections of incidents and family relations that obscure Martel’s much more interesting musings on how we deal with tragedy and find our true home.
Provocative ideas straitjacketed in an overdetermined plot.Pub Date: Feb. 2, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9717-0
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: Nov. 16, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
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
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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