Translated for the first time in English, Ramuz’s slender story will interest students of early European modernism.
Cheerless novel of lost love and madness in the Alps.
Jean-Luc Robille is a giant of a man, blessed with a big baby who now sleeps soundly in a larch crib that Jean-Luc has lovingly crafted himself. His wife, Christine, is beautiful and willful, and no sooner is Jean-Luc out the door to visit a friend than she is canoodling with another man in their mountain village. When Jean-Luc learns of the affair, he confronts her, and she haughtily reminds him of what she said when he proposed to her: “I like Augustin better, and he’s asked me too, but his father is against it because I’m too poor, and I’ve had enough of being a servant in other people’s homes, so let’s get engaged if you’d like; but if Augustin wants to kiss me, I’ll let myself be kissed.” Published in French in 1908, Ramuz’s modernist novel was certainly shocking then, and if it seems a little staid now, it has the class-conscious bite of Marcel Pagnol’s Manon of the Spring. Things get more shocking when, after time has passed and Christine has supposedly been faithful, Jean-Luc learns that the affair has resumed. He throws her out and then, with the grim logic of a classical tragedy, terrible things begin to happen. It would be a spoiler to say just what, but suffice it to say that Jean-Luc descends into alcoholism and madness, wandering into the village wearing the helmet of a papal Swiss Guard and carrying a burden that, as the gendarmes chase him into the mountains, transforms the novel into a painful tale of isolation and woe that resembles nothing so much as Frankenstein save that Mary Shelley’s monster had a richer vocabulary. Plainly, even matter-of-factly written, the story is a downer but an affecting one that leaves readers wishing that Jean-Luc had had better luck.
Translated for the first time in English, Ramuz’s slender story will interest students of early European modernism.Pub Date: Aug. 11, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-64605-016-1
Page Count: 152
Publisher: Deep Vellum
Review Posted Online: May 17, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2020
A dramatic, vividly detailed reconstruction of a little-known aspect of the Vietnam War.
A young woman’s experience as a nurse in Vietnam casts a deep shadow over her life.
When we learn that the farewell party in the opening scene is for Frances “Frankie” McGrath’s older brother—“a golden boy, a wild child who could make the hardest heart soften”—who is leaving to serve in Vietnam in 1966, we feel pretty certain that poor Finley McGrath is marked for death. Still, it’s a surprise when the fateful doorbell rings less than 20 pages later. His death inspires his sister to enlist as an Army nurse, and this turn of events is just the beginning of a roller coaster of a plot that’s impressive and engrossing if at times a bit formulaic. Hannah renders the experiences of the young women who served in Vietnam in all-encompassing detail. The first half of the book, set in gore-drenched hospital wards, mildewed dorm rooms, and boozy officers’ clubs, is an exciting read, tracking the transformation of virginal, uptight Frankie into a crack surgical nurse and woman of the world. Her tensely platonic romance with a married surgeon ends when his broken, unbreathing body is airlifted out by helicopter; she throws her pent-up passion into a wild affair with a soldier who happens to be her dead brother’s best friend. In the second part of the book, after the war, Frankie seems to experience every possible bad break. A drawback of the story is that none of the secondary characters in her life are fully three-dimensional: Her dismissive, chauvinistic father and tight-lipped, pill-popping mother, her fellow nurses, and her various love interests are more plot devices than people. You’ll wish you could have gone to Vegas and placed a bet on the ending—while it’s against all the odds, you’ll see it coming from a mile away.
A dramatic, vividly detailed reconstruction of a little-known aspect of the Vietnam War.Pub Date: Feb. 6, 2024
ISBN: 9781250178633
Page Count: 480
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Nov. 4, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2023
PERSPECTIVES
BOOK TO SCREEN
SEEN & HEARD
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
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