Dreamlike, dense, original, this challenging novel has a cumulative power. Highly recommended.
In her third novel, acclaimed Brazilian luminary Lispector (The Chandelier, 2018, etc.) merges the personal with the mythopoetic in the story of a town transforming into a city and a girl observing it.
Lucrécia Neves lives with her widowed mother in São Geraldo, a place "already mingling some progress with the smell of the stable." Like the female protagonists in other Lispector novels, she is unremarkable, neither intelligent nor imaginative. "Her modest function...was: to look." On long walks through town and into the surrounding countryside she sees things "as a horse sees them," and her observation is linked to the reality of the thing itself. "Reality was needing the girl in order to have a shape...what was seen became her vague story." Seeing, she creates the city. The dense, vivid prose, frequent use of passive voice, close interiority, and dazzling observation already familiar to fans of Lispector's distinctive style are coupled here with a dreamlike surreality. Lucrécia is described at different points as having hooves and wings ("With monotonous and regular flapping she was flying in the darkness above the city"). Over the course of the novel she takes flirtatious walks, carries on insipid conversations, fights with her mother, marries a wealthy older man, moves to a big city, falls in love with someone unavailable. There are insights into relationships familial and matrimonial and unexpected flashes of humor ("Something without interest to anyone was happening, surely 'real life.' ") But what matters most is Lucrécia's way of seeing, which she continues even in sleep, "rubbing, forging, polishing, lathing, sculpting, the demented master-carpenter—preparing palely every night the material of the city." Her visionary function is essential and timeless. "When all the cities were erected with their names, they would destroy themselves anew....Upon the rubble horses would reappear announcing the rebirth of the old reality, their backs without riders. Because thus it had always been. Until a few men would tie them to wagons, once again erecting a city that they wouldn't understand, once again building, with innocent skill, the things. And then once more they'd need a pointing finger to give them their old names." Underpinning the novel are questions about gendered power, about time and the permanent and ephemeral. "And Lucrécia's, was that the true, surrendered life? the one that gets lost, the waves that rise furiously over the rocks, the mortal fragrance of flowers?"
Dreamlike, dense, original, this challenging novel has a cumulative power. Highly recommended.Pub Date: April 30, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-8112-2671-4
Page Count: 208
Publisher: New Directions
Review Posted Online: Jan. 20, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2019
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
The story's very ambiguity steadily feeds its mysteriousness and power, and Danielewski's mastery of postmodernist and...
An amazingly intricate and ambitious first novel - ten years in the making - that puts an engrossing new spin on the traditional haunted-house tale.
Texts within texts, preceded by intriguing introductory material and followed by 150 pages of appendices and related "documents" and photographs, tell the story of a mysterious old house in a Virginia suburb inhabited by esteemed photographer-filmmaker Will Navidson, his companion Karen Green (an ex-fashion model), and their young children Daisy and Chad. The record of their experiences therein is preserved in Will's film The Davidson Record - which is the subject of an unpublished manuscript left behind by a (possibly insane) old man, Frank Zampano - which falls into the possession of Johnny Truant, a drifter who has survived an abusive childhood and the perverse possessiveness of his mad mother (who is institutionalized). As Johnny reads Zampano's manuscript, he adds his own (autobiographical) annotations to the scholarly ones that already adorn and clutter the text (a trick perhaps influenced by David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest) - and begins experiencing panic attacks and episodes of disorientation that echo with ominous precision the content of Davidson's film (their house's interior proves, "impossibly," to be larger than its exterior; previously unnoticed doors and corridors extend inward inexplicably, and swallow up or traumatize all who dare to "explore" their recesses). Danielewski skillfully manipulates the reader's expectations and fears, employing ingeniously skewed typography, and throwing out hints that the house's apparent malevolence may be related to the history of the Jamestown colony, or to Davidson's Pulitzer Prize-winning photograph of a dying Vietnamese child stalked by a waiting vulture. Or, as "some critics [have suggested,] the house's mutations reflect the psychology of anyone who enters it."
The story's very ambiguity steadily feeds its mysteriousness and power, and Danielewski's mastery of postmodernist and cinema-derived rhetoric up the ante continuously, and stunningly. One of the most impressive excursions into the supernatural in many a year.Pub Date: March 6, 2000
ISBN: 0-375-70376-4
Page Count: 704
Publisher: Pantheon
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2000
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