A book that is hard to get through yet hard to forget.
Turkish writer and political activist Livaneli (Bliss, 2006, etc.) uses the story of a modern Turkish woman’s relationship with an aged professor from America to delve into ugly truths about Turkey’s past.
The plot is a cerebral, low-wattage academic thriller. In 2001, 36-year-old Maya Duran, a divorced single mother who works at Istanbul University, is assigned to entertain 87-year-old visiting Harvard professor Max Wagner. Then government agents try to coerce Maya into keeping tabs on Max, who was born in Germany and lived in Turkey from 1939 to '42. Instead, she and her computer-nerd son, Kerem, begin researching Max to learn what secrets the agents fear he might expose. Meanwhile, she grapples with two secrets closer to home: Her paternal grandmother was an Armenian whose parents were massacred, and her maternal grandmother’s family was massacred for being Crimean Turks. Sharing an intense, platonic intimacy with Maya, Max (not himself Jewish) lovingly describes his love for his Jewish wife, Nadia, and her tragic death in what Maya herself calls a “separate section of my book.” Through Max’s story, Livaneli recounts a little-known actual World War II tragedy. In 1941, 769 Romanian Jewish refugees traveled on an ill-equipped ship bound for Palestine. The unseaworthy Struma reached Istanbul, where it sat for 71 day before Turkey—in collusion with Britain, which did not want the refugees to reach Palestine—had the ship with its broken engine hauled out to sea, where a Russian submarine torpedoed it. One passenger survived. Livaneli’s telling is heartbreakingly vivid, his despair over the potential for human and governmental cruelty deeply felt. In contrast, the fictional characters, particularly Maya, remain more strategic than emotionally engaging. Maya is too obviously mouthing the author’s arguments, dropping too many philosophers’ names along the way, and her narrative voice, at least in this translation, remains oddly cerebral even when she discusses her love life and her son. Yet Livaneli’s passion in exposing Turkey's and the West’s culpability in real massacres is eloquent enough to override his ho-hum fictional narrative.
A book that is hard to get through yet hard to forget.Pub Date: March 3, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-63542-016-6
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Other Press
Review Posted Online: Dec. 8, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2020
Too beholden to sentimentality and cliché, this novel fails to establish a uniquely realized perspective.
Hunter’s debut novel tracks the experiences of her family members during the Holocaust.
Sol and Nechuma Kurc, wealthy, cultured Jews in Radom, Poland, are successful shop owners; they and their grown children live a comfortable lifestyle. But that lifestyle is no protection against the onslaught of the Holocaust, which eventually scatters the members of the Kurc family among several continents. Genek, the oldest son, is exiled with his wife to a Siberian gulag. Halina, youngest of all the children, works to protect her family alongside her resistance-fighter husband. Addy, middle child, a composer and engineer before the war breaks out, leaves Europe on one of the last passenger ships, ending up thousands of miles away. Then, too, there are Mila and Felicia, Jakob and Bella, each with their own share of struggles—pain endured, horrors witnessed. Hunter conducted extensive research after learning that her grandfather (Addy in the book) survived the Holocaust. The research shows: her novel is thorough and precise in its details. It’s less precise in its language, however, which frequently relies on cliché. “You’ll get only one shot at this,” Halina thinks, enacting a plan to save her husband. “Don’t botch it.” Later, Genek, confronting a routine bit of paperwork, must decide whether or not to hide his Jewishness. “That form is a deal breaker,” he tells himself. “It’s life and death.” And: “They are low, it seems, on good fortune. And something tells him they’ll need it.” Worse than these stale phrases, though, are the moments when Hunter’s writing is entirely inadequate for the subject matter at hand. Genek, describing the gulag, calls the nearest town “a total shitscape.” This is a low point for Hunter’s writing; elsewhere in the novel, it’s stronger. Still, the characters remain flat and unknowable, while the novel itself is predictable. At this point, more than half a century’s worth of fiction and film has been inspired by the Holocaust—a weighty and imposing tradition. Hunter, it seems, hasn’t been able to break free from her dependence on it.
Too beholden to sentimentality and cliché, this novel fails to establish a uniquely realized perspective.Pub Date: Feb. 14, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-399-56308-9
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: Nov. 21, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2016
BOOK TO SCREEN
Forget about solving all these crimes; the signal triumph here is (spoiler) the heroine’s survival.
Another sweltering month in Charlotte, another boatload of mysteries past and present for overworked, overstressed forensic anthropologist Temperance Brennan.
A week after the night she chases but fails to catch a mysterious trespasser outside her town house, some unknown party texts Tempe four images of a corpse that looks as if it’s been chewed by wild hogs, because it has been. Showboat Medical Examiner Margot Heavner makes it clear that, breaking with her department’s earlier practice (The Bone Collection, 2016, etc.), she has no intention of calling in Tempe as a consultant and promptly identifies the faceless body herself as that of a young Asian man. Nettled by several errors in Heavner’s analysis, and even more by her willingness to share the gory details at a press conference, Tempe launches her own investigation, which is not so much off the books as against the books. Heavner isn’t exactly mollified when Tempe, aided by retired police detective Skinny Slidell and a host of experts, puts a name to the dead man. But the hints of other crimes Tempe’s identification uncovers, particularly crimes against children, spur her on to redouble her efforts despite the new M.E.’s splenetic outbursts. Before he died, it seems, Felix Vodyanov was linked to a passenger ferry that sank in 1994, an even earlier U.S. government project to research biological agents that could control human behavior, the hinky spiritual retreat Sparkling Waters, the dark web site DeepUnder, and the disappearances of at least four schoolchildren, two of whom have also turned up dead. And why on earth was Vodyanov carrying Tempe’s own contact information? The mounting evidence of ever more and ever worse skulduggery will pull Tempe deeper and deeper down what even she sees as a rabbit hole before she confronts a ringleader implicated in “Drugs. Fraud. Breaking and entering. Arson. Kidnapping. How does attempted murder sound?”
Forget about solving all these crimes; the signal triumph here is (spoiler) the heroine’s survival.Pub Date: March 17, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-9821-3888-2
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: Dec. 22, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2020
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