A simple love story at one level, a broad portrait of a nation in flames at another, and a masterwork through and through.
Superb novel of the Spanish Civil War, ranking among the best of the many books written about that conflict.
The war of 1936–39 remains an unhealed wound, and Molina (Sepharad, 2003, etc.) runs a certain risk—as, recently, did Javier Cercas with Soldiers of Salamis—in revisiting it. He does so from the point of view of an architect, Ignacio Abel, who has risen from the ranks of the working poor, his bricklayer father scorning and pitying him for his lack of macho strength, living a life in which “feeling the blow of the slap that hadn’t yet struck his pale face” constitutes business as usual. Ignacio is a socialist but no firebrand; even so, he feels himself in danger, and throughout the narrative, even in flight, he wrestles with the question of whether he should stay in Spain and fight or move on to some place such as New York, where he has both a reputation and a lover. Problem is, even as he’s wrestling with rationalizations (which “sounded like the lie of someone who’s going to desert”), his lover is bent on going to Spain to join the loyalist cause herself. Ignacio is something of a cipher, even as others in his circle do their best to remain safe and anonymous—and for good reason, since Molina delivers a scathing, Goya-esque view of war: “Now the long whistles of mortars, and a few seconds later the earth rose in the fields along the highway like streams of lava in an erupting volcano.” Molina writes with the epic sweep of Boris Pasternak, claiming the space hitherto occupied by the non-Spanish novelist Ernest Hemingway; his story is long but without a slack moment, as it carefully builds a portrait of a world that has disappeared and a moment that is about to: “Think of how big the world is,” as Ignacio says, “how complicated it is for two people to meet. We’ve been lucky twice—there won’t be another time.”
A simple love story at one level, a broad portrait of a nation in flames at another, and a masterwork through and through.Pub Date: Dec. 3, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-547-54784-8
Page Count: 656
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Review Posted Online: Nov. 13, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2013
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
The Brat Pack meets The Bacchae in this precious, way-too-long, and utterly unsuspenseful town-and-gown murder tale. A bunch of ever-so-mandarin college kids in a small Vermont school are the eager epigones of an aloof classics professor, and in their exclusivity and snobbishness and eagerness to please their teacher, they are moved to try to enact Dionysian frenzies in the woods. During the only one that actually comes off, a local farmer happens upon them—and they kill him. But the death isn't ruled a murder—and might never have been if one of the gang—a cadging sybarite named Bunny Corcoran—hadn't shown signs of cracking under the secret's weight. And so he too is dispatched. The narrator, a blank-slate Californian named Richard Pepen chronicles the coverup. But if you're thinking remorse-drama, conscience masque, or even semi-trashy who'll-break-first? page-turner, forget it: This is a straight gee-whiz, first-to-have-ever-noticed college novel—"Hampden College, as a body, was always strangely prone to hysteria. Whether from isolation, malice, or simple boredom, people there were far more credulous and excitable than educated people are generally thought to be, and this hermetic, overheated atmosphere made it a thriving black petri dish of melodrama and distortion." First-novelist Tartt goes muzzy when she has to describe human confrontations (the murder, or sex, or even the ping-ponging of fear), and is much more comfortable in transcribing aimless dorm-room paranoia or the TV shows that the malefactors anesthetize themselves with as fate ticks down. By telegraphing the murders, Tartt wants us to be continually horrified at these kids—while inviting us to semi-enjoy their manneristic fetishes and refined tastes. This ersatz-Fitzgerald mix of moralizing and mirror-looking (Jay McInerney shook and poured the shaker first) is very 80's—and in Tartt's strenuous version already seems dated, formulaic. Les Nerds du Mal—and about as deep (if not nearly as involving) as a TV movie.
Pub Date: Sept. 16, 1992
ISBN: 1400031702
Page Count: 592
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1992
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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