Intellectually and morally pretentious.
A didactic, overearnest allegory about the evils of colonialism and male chauvinism—in a story set in Germany and the former German colony of South West Africa, now Namibia.
As always, Brink is best at describing the landscape, in this case of the austerely beautiful but unforgiving great Namib Desert and the Bushmen, African tribes, and German settlers who live there. He’s less successful, though—thanks to no allowance for shading—in addressing the ideas and themes that implacably drive the story. Hanna X, a mutilated German woman raised in an orphanage, makes a decision that changes her life. Living in a desert refuge for women that’s also a brothel, she describes the events that led her to flee the refuge and embark, like her heroine Joan of Arc, on a brutal crusade. Moving back and forth between her years in Germany and the events in Africa, she relates how her childhood in Germany was a period of sexual abuse by the orphanage pastor as well as by many of her employers. Once in Africa, she fared even worse. Longing to see the world, she joined with women—in the early 1900s—who were sent by the German government to be the wives of the bachelor German settlers. On the train journey from the port to the colonial capital, however, Hanna is not only raped but terribly mutilated by one of the soldiers accompanying them: her tongue is removed, her ears and genitalia cut off. Later, when Hanna sees young Katya, an orphan at the refuge, being assaulted by a visiting German officer, she kills him, hides his body, and, with Katya, heads into the desert. As the two women journey to the capital to find the man who mutilated her, Hanna encourages those African tribes also bent on avenging the colonialists to join them. They defeat a German fort, though in another action, only Katya and Hanna will survive.
Intellectually and morally pretentious.Pub Date: June 1, 2003
ISBN: 0-15-100770-5
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Harcourt
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2003
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
An illuminating read for anyone interested in the inner workings of the Catholic Church; for prelate-fiction superfans, it...
Harris, creator of grand, symphonic thrillers from Fatherland (1992) to An Officer and a Spy (2014), scores with a chamber piece of a novel set in the Vatican in the days after a fictional pope dies.
Fictional, yes, but the nameless pontiff has a lot in common with our own Francis: he’s famously humble, shunning the lavish Apostolic Palace for a small apartment, and he is committed to leading a church that engages with the world and its problems. In the aftermath of his sudden death, rumors circulate about the pope’s intention to fire certain cardinals. At the center of the action is Cardinal Lomeli, Dean of the College of Cardinals, whose job it is to manage the conclave that will elect a new pope. He believes it is also his duty to uncover what the pope knew before he died because some of the cardinals in question are in the running to succeed him. “In the running” is an apt phrase because, as described by Harris, the papal conclave is the ultimate political backroom—albeit a room, the Sistine Chapel, covered with Michelangelo frescoes. Vying for the papal crown are an African cardinal whom many want to see as the first black pope, a press-savvy Canadian, an Italian arch-conservative (think Cardinal Scalia), and an Italian liberal who wants to continue the late pope’s campaign to modernize the church. The novel glories in the ancient rituals that constitute the election process while still grounding that process in the real world: the Sistine Chapel is fitted with jamming devices to thwart electronic eavesdropping, and the pressure to act quickly is increased because “rumours that the pope is dead are already trending on social media.”
An illuminating read for anyone interested in the inner workings of the Catholic Church; for prelate-fiction superfans, it is pure temptation.Pub Date: Nov. 22, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-451-49344-6
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Sept. 6, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2016
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