Finely written and deeply empathetic, a powerful portrait of artistic commitment and emotional frustration.
Horrocks follows up her well-regarded story collection, This Is Not Your City (2011), with a rueful novel about composer Erik Satie, his family, and friends.
The parameters of the Satie siblings’ lives are set shortly after their mother dies in 1872. Their overwhelmed father leaves them with relatives and vanishes; when he returns with a new wife, only Erik and younger brother Conrad are reclaimed, while Louise is left with their great-uncle. Her rage and bitterness are mostly justified by subsequent events in her life, chronicled in a first-person narration so vivid it frequently steals focus from the chapters narrated by Erik, Conrad, Erik’s friend Philippe, and Suzanne, the only woman emotionally cut-off Erik comes close to loving. The twin traumas of his mother’s death and the involuntary separation from Louise have made him pathologically wary of any kind of connection, including those that might smooth the way for his deliberately provocative music. Aspiring poet Philippe collaborates with Erik for a while and admires his friend’s disdain for compromise but ultimately opts for a more stable existence. Horrocks paints an atmospheric portrait of bohemian Paris and a poignant one of Satie and his avant-garde circle, who “lived in the yet: not now, but soon” when their art would be recognized. Meanwhile, they drink and scandalize the bourgeoisie with their bad behavior. An episode of unintentional cruelty cements Erik’s estrangement from Louise, whose losses mount in a wrenching account made bearable only by the fact that she narrates it as an elderly survivor in 1944. Erik’s story takes longer to engage readers, but gradually his austere passion and fierce dedication to his music become as affecting as Louise’s catalog of pain and deprivation. A keening finale revisits him at 21, with “the most popular seven minutes he will ever write…fading away in the sweaty, soot-dark room.”
Finely written and deeply empathetic, a powerful portrait of artistic commitment and emotional frustration.Pub Date: July 30, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-316-31691-0
Page Count: 464
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: May 1, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2019
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
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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