A meticulous and vivid chronicle.
Thomas’ latest (Farewell, My Queen, 2003, etc.) illuminates an obscure corner of Western European royal history: the bartering of child brides and grooms.
In 1721, Mariana Victoria, the 3-year-old infanta of Spain, is married by proxy to King Louis XV of France, then only 11. The two are first cousins, descendants of the Spanish and French branches of the Bourbon dynasty. Mariana Victoria, with her cherished Carmen-Doll and a magnificent entourage, journeys to France, where she will live at various royal palaces (Versailles is her least favorite). The architect of this union, the Duc D’Orléans, Louis' uncle and regent until the king attains majority at 13, has sweetened the deal by adding his own daughter, Louise Élisabeth, to the mix—she is sent to Spain to marry her second cousin Don Luis the Prince of Asturia, Mariana's half brother and heir to the Spanish throne. Louise is 12, Don Luis, 14. Thomas skillfully extracts dramatic moments from the ponderous mechanics of nuptial diplomacy. On arrival in Spain, the French ambassador, Saint-Simon, gets lost in Alcázar, the mazelike royal palace of King Philip V, and detests Spain’s pervasive “[stink] of olive oil.” On Pheasant Island in the river Bidasoa, the princesses meet while crossing the border in opposite directions. Mariana finds an unlikely mentor in the shrewd, 70-year-old Princess Palatine, the regent's mother. Even more than most royal arranged marriages, these two unions seem doomed from the start. Not only must consummation of Louis and Mariana's marriage be put off for several years, threatening the succession (which is one reason D’Orléans, next in line for the throne, favored the match), but Louis prefers men anyway. Louise also prefers her own sex and has physical and mental health issues, including an exhibitionist streak. The infanta, though articulate beyond her years, seems to have stopped growing. Although the narrative pace is that of an intricate multipanel tapestry, the characters are brought to life in all their frailty. Cullen’s translation ably mirrors Thomas’ arch, scandalmongering style.
A meticulous and vivid chronicle.Pub Date: July 7, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-59051-702-4
Page Count: 329
Publisher: Other Press
Review Posted Online: April 27, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2015
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
The story's very ambiguity steadily feeds its mysteriousness and power, and Danielewski's mastery of postmodernist and...
An amazingly intricate and ambitious first novel - ten years in the making - that puts an engrossing new spin on the traditional haunted-house tale.
Texts within texts, preceded by intriguing introductory material and followed by 150 pages of appendices and related "documents" and photographs, tell the story of a mysterious old house in a Virginia suburb inhabited by esteemed photographer-filmmaker Will Navidson, his companion Karen Green (an ex-fashion model), and their young children Daisy and Chad. The record of their experiences therein is preserved in Will's film The Davidson Record - which is the subject of an unpublished manuscript left behind by a (possibly insane) old man, Frank Zampano - which falls into the possession of Johnny Truant, a drifter who has survived an abusive childhood and the perverse possessiveness of his mad mother (who is institutionalized). As Johnny reads Zampano's manuscript, he adds his own (autobiographical) annotations to the scholarly ones that already adorn and clutter the text (a trick perhaps influenced by David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest) - and begins experiencing panic attacks and episodes of disorientation that echo with ominous precision the content of Davidson's film (their house's interior proves, "impossibly," to be larger than its exterior; previously unnoticed doors and corridors extend inward inexplicably, and swallow up or traumatize all who dare to "explore" their recesses). Danielewski skillfully manipulates the reader's expectations and fears, employing ingeniously skewed typography, and throwing out hints that the house's apparent malevolence may be related to the history of the Jamestown colony, or to Davidson's Pulitzer Prize-winning photograph of a dying Vietnamese child stalked by a waiting vulture. Or, as "some critics [have suggested,] the house's mutations reflect the psychology of anyone who enters it."
The story's very ambiguity steadily feeds its mysteriousness and power, and Danielewski's mastery of postmodernist and cinema-derived rhetoric up the ante continuously, and stunningly. One of the most impressive excursions into the supernatural in many a year.Pub Date: March 6, 2000
ISBN: 0-375-70376-4
Page Count: 704
Publisher: Pantheon
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2000
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