Like war itself, this novel reveals its ineffable mysteries though it resists being understood too easily.
Through an accumulation of devastating details, an Italian novel made up of stories within stories reveals truths about World War II and its aftermath that many (in the novel as well as in real life) would prefer to keep buried.
In his new novel, Magris (Blindly, 2012, etc.) examines war as a universal force that pervades history and the very specific horror that enveloped his home city of Trieste after WWII. The novel’s unnamed protagonist is an obsessive collector who was determined to curate a Museum of War, an establishment to promote peace, until he died in a fire in the process of fulfilling his ambition—likely an act of self-immolation. What remains of his legacy lies in his notebooks—at least the ones that haven't gone missing, perhaps burned in the fire. He took copious notes, and he named names: conspirators, collaborators, spies, casualties, even a rare hero (whose own story is open to dispute and revision). The pages that remain aren't in any order, at least as they're presented by Luisa, the archivist charged with fulfilling his mission by filling rooms with the artifacts that remain in the collection. Some of the chapters are descriptions of these rooms or of Luisa's plans for them. Some are taken from the protagonist’s notebooks, his “scribblings that so agitated his heirs—though they weren’t the only ones,” and which Luisa presents in pretty much random fashion. Interwoven as a separate narrative thread are chapters headed as “Luisa’s Story,” a recounting of her girlhood in Trieste, of her Jewish Italian mother and her black soldier father, of the horrors in Trieste which no one mentions and which she discovers as if through osmosis—“there is an atrocity that one wanted—had to?—forget. In Trieste, on every street, I see the smoke that no one wanted to see.”
Like war itself, this novel reveals its ineffable mysteries though it resists being understood too easily.Pub Date: April 11, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-300-21848-0
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Yale Univ.
Review Posted Online: Feb. 23, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2017
BOOK REVIEW
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
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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