In so dark a tale there can be no chirpy affirmations, but only telling indictments of the corrupt, the cruel, and the...
Portugal’s years under the fascist Salazar are portrayed in a succession of bad dreams, each vividly recalled as characters comment on that dark night of the national soul.
Antunes experiments with language and ideas in a story both allusive and surreal: sinister dogs haunt the landscape, and one narrator is building a boat as a means of escape though the sea is some distance away. But what counts is the cumulative effect and an atmosphere rendered so that history is both judged and understood—in a read that’s challenging as various voices pick up the narrative or circle back on what has just been revealed. It opens as the middle-aged Jao enters a Lisbon courtroom for a divorce hearing. Jao, a gentle soul, is the only son of Senhor Francisco and his wife Isabel, who ran off with another man when Jao was still a small boy. Jao has been living on the family farm, once a prosperous place where the Senhor, a senior minister in Salazar’s fascist government, lavishly entertained the dictator and his cronies. Now, it’s a rundown, falling-apart place where Jao is building a boat to escape while he’s still sane, unlike his father, who ended up demented and in a hospital. As the case proceeds, Jao recalls how his father used the farmwomen and how he panicked when Salazar fell, fearing that communists were coming to get him and the farm. Jao, the Senhor, life on the farm, and the excesses of the former regime—arbitrary imprisonment and brutality in Africa—are remembered by a string of characters like Dona Titina, the aging housekeeper who raised Jao; Sofia, Jao’s socialite wife; the Senhor’s mistresses; his illegitimate daughter, as well as the senile Senhor himself.
In so dark a tale there can be no chirpy affirmations, but only telling indictments of the corrupt, the cruel, and the unjust—and these Antunes memorably accomplishes.Pub Date: Jan. 1, 2003
ISBN: 0-8021-1732-5
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Grove
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2002
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
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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