A strong entry for a college course on feminism and literature, this is too contrived and didactic to do well outside the...
This love triangle presents a distinctive heroine but more archaic melodrama than those outside academia are likely to enjoy.
A major 19th-century (1843-1920) Spanish writer, Galdós (Misericordia, 2014, etc.) is often ranked second only to Cervantes. This 1892 novel may be familiar from the 1970 Luis Buñuel film of the same name. Set in Madrid, the story begins shortly after the title character is taken in as a teen orphan by an aging Don Lope as he is winding down from years of heedless seduction. She succumbs to his practiced charms and becomes his last great conquest but by age 21 recognizes the limitations of life as a mistress. A chance encounter leads her into a passionate and rather gawky affair with a young painter named Horacio. She refuses, though, to accept another set of fetters. She casts about for a way to keep her lover while becoming independent and productive, mulling at different times painting, music and acting. Galdós’ liberal leanings shape a female iconoclast in the land of machismo. He lays it on thick by making Don Lope an unlikely Lothario of taste, intelligence and Old World gallantry, if not chivalry—there is much of Don Quixote in him without the delusions and innocence. Horacio plays the perfect shallow romantic hero: a handsome artist with money, a house on the coast, a great tan and a bottomless patience for Tristana’s restless ambition. When the young lovers must endure a period of separation, the reader must endure many pages of letters filled with pet names, cute puns and painless torments. Galdós is most interesting and least predictable in the psychological shifts and byplay between Don Lope and Tristana, but the book would need a lot more of that to mute the emotional megaphone of the rest.
A strong entry for a college course on feminism and literature, this is too contrived and didactic to do well outside the world of required reading.Pub Date: Oct. 14, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-59017-765-5
Page Count: 288
Publisher: New York Review Books
Review Posted Online: Aug. 13, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2014
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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