A lackluster novel from a great writer.
Another novel with a Brontë connection from the award-winning British author.
Long before she became known for writing the feminist classic Wide Sargasso Sea, the author Jean Rhys was a girl named Ella Gwendolyn Rees Williams. Phillips begins his fictional account of Rhys’ life with her childhood on the island of Dominica, in the British West Indies. In his last book, The Lost Child (2015), Phillips used Wuthering Heights as the inspiration for a modern story about race and colonialism. The connections between Emily Brontë’s life and work and Phillips’ own novel were both rich and subtle. Race and colonialism are key themes, here, too, but their treatment is less thought-provoking, in part because race and colonialism are such obvious factors in Rhys’ biography and her masterpiece. For instance, it comes as no surprise that young Gwendolen’s (this is the spelling Phillips uses) mother doesn’t want her to socialize with the child of “Negro” servants, and Phillips’ depiction of the moment when Gwendolen is forever separated from her friend goes unexamined. Indeed, this novel is, for the most part, written in a blandly expository style, and it often veers dangerously close to cliché. Also, Phillips makes the stylistic choice to refer to his protagonist only as “she” (except when other characters refer to her in dialogue), regardless of any interfering antecedent, and there are many instances in which this is confusing, even for the reader who’s learned to expect it. After The Lost Child, this novel is a bit of a letdown. This is surprising, too, because Rhys led an undeniably unusual life. After she left home—at her parents’ insistence—for England at the age of 16, she studied acting. She spent much of the 1920s in Paris. She had numerous lovers and three husbands. And her oeuvre, though small, has been hugely influential, especially for female writers and academics. Phillips is under no obligation to make his protagonist sensational, of course, but he doesn’t even make her interesting. We get that Gwen is high-strung. We watch as she endures disappointments and tragedies. We see all this as if from a distance. There’s no depth here.
A lackluster novel from a great writer.Pub Date: May 22, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-374-28361-2
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: March 19, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2018
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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