A riveting protagonist moves through unbearable racial carnage into a kind of legend.
A violent and sorrowful Jim Crow South brims in this brutal novel.
For his 17th book, poet and novelist Smith creates a harrowing, luminous Jim Crow story that takes its title from “a negro name, Ginny Gall, for the hell beyond hell, hell’s hell.” The terrain is so frequently hellish—lynchings, firebombings, beatings, rapes—that one wonders how Smith stomached the work. His writing, in its lyricism, makes a queasy juxtaposition between horror and beauty. The story hinges on a reimagining of the Scottsboro Boys trials, in which nine African-American youth were railroaded on false rape charges. This novel begins “on the hot July day in 1913 exactly fifty years after the final day of the Battle of Gettysburg, a day uncelebrated in Chattanooga.” A prostitute named Cappie Florence gives birth to her fourth child, Delvin Walker, who becomes the Bigger Thomas–like protagonist here. The birth is perilous, the child—who reads at an astonishingly early age—is pronounced “wonderanemous,” and the reader is gulled into thinking the story might be picaresque. Instead, Cappie flees police before Page 20 when Delvin isn’t yet 5. He and his siblings are dumped into a foundling home, but the resourceful child finds himself, some two years later, apprenticed to a prosperous African-American funeral home director. Smith divides his novel into four books, and to start Book 2, he conjures a racial misunderstanding that puts teenage Delvin on the road at the cusp of the Great Depression. The adolescent traveler, like this novel, is ruminative, and for long stretches, his story is more pastoral than propulsive. Smith writes lushly, with a painterly eye. He depicts a mesmerizing, theologically rich funeral for a lynched man; Delvin’s yearning for a college girl with whom he has one afternoon of rapturous conversation is achingly, gorgeously executed. Everywhere racism chars these pages. By Book 3, armed white men have forced Delvin and his doomed cohort off a Memphis-bound train. The writing can be a touch ripe: here is a man without consequence shutting a door in the street: “The sound was like a last clap of a civilization closing up.” Still, for the resilient reader, a spell is cast.
A riveting protagonist moves through unbearable racial carnage into a kind of legend.Pub Date: Feb. 2, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-06-225055-1
Page Count: 464
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Nov. 18, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2015
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
Tinny perhaps, but still a minutely rendered and impressively steady feminist vision of apocalypse.
The time is the not-so-distant future, when the US's spiraling social freedoms have finally called down a reaction, an Iranian-style repressive "monotheocracy" calling itself the Republic of Gilead—a Bible-thumping, racist, capital-punishing, and misogynistic rule that would do away with pleasure altogether were it not for one thing: that the Gileadan women, pure and true (as opposed to all the nonbelieving women, those who've ever been adulterous or married more than once), are found rarely fertile.
Thus are drafted a whole class of "handmaids," whose function is to bear the children of the elite, to be fecund or else (else being certain death, sent out to be toxic-waste removers on outlying islands). The narrative frame for Atwood's dystopian vision is the hopeless private testimony of one of these surrogate mothers, Offred ("of" plus the name of her male protector). Lying cradled by the body of the barren wife, being meanwhile serviced by the husband, Offred's "ceremony" must be successful—if she does not want to join the ranks of the other disappeared (which include her mother, her husband—dead—and small daughter, all taken away during the years of revolt). One Of her only human conduits is a gradually developing affair with her master's chauffeur—something that's balanced more than offset, though, by the master's hypocritically un-Puritan use of her as a kind of B-girl at private parties held by the ruling men in a spirit of nostalgia and lust. This latter relationship, edging into real need (the master's), is very effectively done; it highlights the handmaid's (read Everywoman's) eternal exploitation, profane or sacred ("We are two-legged wombs, that's all: sacred vessels, ambulatory chalices"). Atwood, to her credit, creates a chillingly specific, imaginable night-mare. The book is short on characterization—this is Atwood, never a warm writer, at her steeliest—and long on cynicism—it's got none of the human credibility of a work such as Walker Percy's Love In The Ruins. But the scariness is visceral, a world that's like a dangerous and even fatal grid, an electrified fence.
Tinny perhaps, but still a minutely rendered and impressively steady feminist vision of apocalypse.Pub Date: Feb. 17, 1985
ISBN: 038549081X
Page Count: -
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
Review Posted Online: Sept. 16, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 1985
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
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