A stirring, surrealistic, and blood-soaked journey into a dark historical moment.
A coruscating and influential tale of the brutal aftermath of Haiti’s liberation.
This powerful 1949 short novel by Carpentier (1904-1980) reportedly moved Gabriel García Márquezto rewrite parts of One Hundred Years of Solitude, writes Pablo Medina in an afterword to this new translation. There certainly are plenty of magical-realist touches that suggest the Cuban-born writer had an influence on the Latin American Boom of the 1960s, but Carpentier’s magic is of a darker sort: a woman sinks her arms into boiling oil and removes them unscathed; a wounded slave is empowered to shape-shift into various animals, fathering a boar-faced child; mirrors spontaneously combust. The otherworldly imagery, though, is less a focal point than an undercurrent to an elegantly turned series of vignettes about slavery and brutality. At the story’s center is Ti Noël, a slave who witnesses the rising revolt against French rule, starting with the poisoning (and rapid deaths) of plantation owners throughout the island. (“The priests had to quicken their Latin to attend to all the mourning families.”) After the Haitian revolution, the country was led by King Henri Christophe, a former slave, but his rule only sustained the violence and disorder: the lavish palaces the king demanded, Ti Noël notes, “were the result of a slavery as abominable as the one he had known in the plantation.” Fires, whippings, rapes, murders, and dogs trained “to eat blacks” are all part of Carpentier’s milieu, and he keenly balances elegant, surrealistic prose with more realistic visions of the impact of racism and lawlessness. Ti Noël himself is no hero—he’s complicit in the rapes and violence—but as a tour guide through the hellishness of black men enslaving other blacks, he delivers a memorable lesson that “it was not enough to be a goose in order to believe that all geese were equal.”
A stirring, surrealistic, and blood-soaked journey into a dark historical moment.Pub Date: Nov. 7, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-374-53738-8
Page Count: 160
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: Aug. 29, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2017
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
A deeply satisfying novel, both sensuously vivid and remarkably poignant.
Norwegian novelist Jacobsen folds a quietly powerful coming-of-age story into a rendition of daily life on one of Norway’s rural islands a hundred years ago in a novel that was shortlisted for the 2017 Man Booker International Prize.
Ingrid Barrøy, her father, Hans, mother, Maria, grandfather Martin, and slightly addled aunt Barbro are the owners and sole inhabitants of Barrøy Island, one of numerous small family-owned islands in an area of Norway barely touched by the outside world. The novel follows Ingrid from age 3 through a carefree early childhood of endless small chores, simple pleasures, and unquestioned familial love into her more ambivalent adolescence attending school off the island and becoming aware of the outside world, then finally into young womanhood when she must make difficult choices. Readers will share Ingrid’s adoration of her father, whose sense of responsibility conflicts with his romantic nature. He adores Maria, despite what he calls her “la-di-da” ways, and is devoted to Ingrid. Twice he finds work on the mainland for his sister, Barbro, but, afraid she’ll be unhappy, he brings her home both times. Rooted to the land where he farms and tied to the sea where he fishes, Hans struggles to maintain his family’s hardscrabble existence on an island where every repair is a struggle against the elements. But his efforts are Sisyphean. Life as a Barrøy on Barrøy remains precarious. Changes do occur in men’s and women’s roles, reflected in part by who gets a literal chair to sit on at meals, while world crises—a war, Sweden’s financial troubles—have unexpected impact. Yet the drama here occurs in small increments, season by season, following nature’s rhythm through deaths and births, moments of joy and deep sorrow. The translator’s decision to use roughly translated phrases in conversation—i.e., “Tha’s goen’ nohvar” for "You’re going nowhere")—slows the reading down at first but ends up drawing readers more deeply into the world of Barrøy and its prickly, intensely alive inhabitants.
A deeply satisfying novel, both sensuously vivid and remarkably poignant.Pub Date: April 7, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-77196-319-0
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Biblioasis
Review Posted Online: Jan. 12, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2020
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