Vague on facts but intense, atmospheric and erotic, this is more prose poem than historical novel.
An impressionistic portrait of the famous spy—in reality an abused wife and mother with intense sexual charms.
Abandoned by her father and orphaned when her mother died, young Dutch Margaretha finds herself working for a teacher who molests her, then dependent on her unsympathetic uncle. Seeking escape, she enters into a bad marriage to MacLeod, a cruel, promiscuous, half-deranged army captain. Murphy’s third novel (Here They Come, 2006, etc.) switches between Margaretha’s dreamy but chronological account of her unhappy progression and scenes from later prison life, in which she is tended by nuns and interrogated by the French for spying. After the birth of their son Norman, MacLeod and Margaretha move to Java, where his behavior worsens. Wearied by the tropical rain, Margaretha starts to use the name Mata Hari, meaning sunrise. She has an affair with another Dutch officer while MacLeod visits prostitutes. A daughter, Non, is born, but MacLeod’s abuse of one of the servants leads to the children being poisoned and Norman dies. Mata Hari survives typhoid and eventually persuades MacLeod to move back to Europe. Once there, he ejects her from the marriage and excludes her from care of Non. Short of cash, Mata Hari is forced to become an erotic dancer in Paris and mistress to men who reward her with jewels, cash, even a horse. When World War I begins she is asked to spy by the French but exposed by the Germans, later arrested in Paris, tried and shot. All she ever wanted was her daughter back.
Vague on facts but intense, atmospheric and erotic, this is more prose poem than historical novel.Pub Date: Nov. 14, 2007
ISBN: 978-0-316-11264-2
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 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
This book sings with the terrible silence of dead civilizations in which once there was valor.
Written with quiet dignity that builds to a climax of tragic force, this book about the dissolution of an African tribe, its traditions, and values, represents a welcome departure from the familiar "Me, white brother" genre.
Written by a Nigerian African trained in missionary schools, this novel tells quietly the story of a brave man, Okonkwo, whose life has absolute validity in terms of his culture, and who exercises his prerogative as a warrior, father, and husband with unflinching single mindedness. But into the complex Nigerian village filters the teachings of strangers, teachings so alien to the tribe, that resistance is impossible. One must distinguish a force to be able to oppose it, and to most, the talk of Christian salvation is no more than the babbling of incoherent children. Still, with his guns and persistence, the white man, amoeba-like, gradually absorbs the native culture and in despair, Okonkwo, unable to withstand the corrosion of what he, alone, understands to be the life force of his people, hangs himself. In the formlessness of the dying culture, it is the missionary who takes note of the event, reminding himself to give Okonkwo's gesture a line or two in his work, The Pacification of the Primitive Tribes of the Lower Niger.
This book sings with the terrible silence of dead civilizations in which once there was valor.Pub Date: Jan. 23, 1958
ISBN: 0385474547
Page Count: 207
Publisher: McDowell, Obolensky
Review Posted Online: April 23, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1958
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BOOK REVIEW
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