A suspenseful but occasionally long-winded account of a prisoner’s escape from a German concentration camp.
Anti-fascists fight back in World War II Germany in this novel that was written during the war.
When seven prisoners escape from the Westhofen concentration camp, the commandant, Fahrenberg, erects seven crosses, made from plane trees, in the yard. Each cross is studded with nails. Each cross is then hung, one by one, with a prisoner, as each of the escapees is found and recaptured. German novelist Seghers (Transit, 2013, etc.) introduces each of the escapees but is primarily concerned with one: George Heisler, once notorious for his womanizing, now for his ability to withstand interrogations without either giving up names or allowing a smirk to drop from his features. This novel, which first appeared in English in 1942 and was made into a film starring Spencer Tracy, is only now appearing in unabridged form in English. It’s concerned not with Jewish camp inmates (the word “Jew” appears only once or twice in the entire novel) but with anti-fascist German nationals. It’s Heisler’s activities on behalf of the Communists that land him in camp, though the precise nature of those activities remains vague. Seghers is mainly concerned with his escape and with the network of characters affected in one way or another by that escape. So we meet Fritz, the hapless young man whose jacket Heisler steals; Franz, a former friend who radicalized Heisler before Heisler stole his girlfriend, Elli, and made her his wife; Elli herself, long estranged from Heisler; Elli’s father, who makes a living hanging wallpaper; commandant Fahrenberg; and more—many more. Through these many characters, Seghers is able to provide a thorough autopsy on German society of the time, with its various classes and varying levels of enthusiasm for the current government. Still, there are almost too many characters to keep track of, and we’re still meeting new faces in the novel’s final pages. Likewise, the narrative itself is loose and rangy in places—it could have benefited from some tightening. But there’s no dearth of suspense, and Seghers’ skill in describing the many dangers, risks, and accompanying paranoias of the time is unimpeachable.
A suspenseful but occasionally long-winded account of a prisoner’s escape from a German concentration camp.Pub Date: May 22, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-68137-212-9
Page Count: 416
Publisher: New York Review Books
Review Posted Online: March 4, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2018
Amateurish, with a twist savvy readers will see coming from a mile away.
A woman accused of shooting her husband six times in the face refuses to speak.
"Alicia Berenson was thirty-three years old when she killed her husband. They had been married for seven years. They were both artists—Alicia was a painter, and Gabriel was a well-known fashion photographer." Michaelides' debut is narrated in the voice of psychotherapist Theo Faber, who applies for a job at the institution where Alicia is incarcerated because he's fascinated with her case and believes he will be able to get her to talk. The narration of the increasingly unrealistic events that follow is interwoven with excerpts from Alicia's diary. Ah, yes, the old interwoven diary trick. When you read Alicia's diary you'll conclude the woman could well have been a novelist instead of a painter because it contains page after page of detailed dialogue, scenes, and conversations quite unlike those in any journal you've ever seen. " 'What's the matter?' 'I can't talk about it on the phone, I need to see you.' 'It's just—I'm not sure I can make it up to Cambridge at the minute.' 'I'll come to you. This afternoon. Okay?' Something in Paul's voice made me agree without thinking about it. He sounded desperate. 'Okay. Are you sure you can't tell me about it now?' 'I'll see you later.' Paul hung up." Wouldn't all this appear in a diary as "Paul wouldn't tell me what was wrong"? An even more improbable entry is the one that pins the tail on the killer. While much of the book is clumsy, contrived, and silly, it is while reading passages of the diary that one may actually find oneself laughing out loud.
Amateurish, with a twist savvy readers will see coming from a mile away.Pub Date: Feb. 5, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-250-30169-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Celadon Books
Review Posted Online: Nov. 3, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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