A simple story, on its face, but full of resounding depths: a dark commemoration of a dark time but offering the slim hope...
Krivák (The Sojourn, 2011, etc.) returns to home ground in this elegiac story of rural life in a time of turmoil.
If this were Turgenev, Krivák’s characters would be peasants, sturdy caretakers of the soil with a sure awareness that life is hard and fleeting. As it is, the Vinich clan, descended of a Slovak immigrant who saw all he cared to of war in the trenches of Galicia, is a salt-of-the-earth breed, unassuming and mostly steady, even a little wealthy “in a town where land meant wealth.” Bo, perhaps the steadiest of them all, goes off to college to read the Greeks and learn a little about the world beyond their narrow valley in the Endless Mountains of northeastern Pennsylvania; he returns home to take his place among the sawyers and farmers, even as the patriarch slides toward death and his brother, Sam, ships off to Vietnam, there to be lost—missing in action, the official forms say. Krivák’s modest story finds Bo trying to do the right thing by all concerned while living up to some of his book-learned ideals; called on to act heroically, he does so while otherwise serving as the guardian of a fragile mother, the preserver of family memory, and, indeed, the beacon to guide his brother home. In one of the book’s most affecting moments, he travels to West Virginia to meet a member of Sam’s unit, who evokes the terror of Vietnam: “You want to talk about ghosts? Fucking VC….Not a sound in that jungle except the sticks we broke on the ground and our boots when we pulled them out of the mud.” Should they erect a tombstone? Like Michael Cimino’s Deer Hunter, set in a neighboring country and addressing some of the same themes, this is a story about love and loyalty, with moments of sudden violence and great beauty.
A simple story, on its face, but full of resounding depths: a dark commemoration of a dark time but offering the slim hope that things will get better.Pub Date: Jan. 24, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-5011-2637-6
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: Oct. 18, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2016
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
Jonathan Livingston Kitty, it’s not.
A lonely postman learns that he’s about to die—and reflects on life as he bargains with a Hawaiian-shirt–wearing devil.
The 30-year-old first-person narrator in filmmaker/novelist Kawamura’s slim novel is, by his own admission, “boring…a monotone guy,” so unimaginative that, when he learns he has a brain tumor, the bucket list he writes down is dull enough that “even the cat looked disgusted with me.” Luckily—or maybe not—a friendly devil, dubbed Aloha, pops onto the scene, and he’s willing to make a deal: an extra day of life in exchange for being allowed to remove something pleasant from the world. The first thing excised is phones, which goes well enough. (The narrator is pleasantly surprised to find that “people seemed to have no problem finding something to fill up their free time.”) But deals with the devil do have a way of getting complicated. This leads to shallow musings (“Sometimes, when you rewatch a film after not having seen it for a long time, it makes a totally different impression on you than it did the first time you saw it. Of course, the movie hasn’t changed; it’s you who’s changed") written in prose so awkward, it’s possibly satire (“Tears dripped down onto the letter like warm, salty drops of rain”). Even the postman’s beloved cat, who gains the power of speech, ends up being prim and annoying. The narrator ponders feelings about a lost love, his late mother, and his estranged father in a way that some readers might find moving at times. But for many, whatever made this book a bestseller in Japan is going to be lost in translation.
Jonathan Livingston Kitty, it’s not.Pub Date: March 12, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-250-29405-0
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Flatiron Books
Review Posted Online: Feb. 16, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2019
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