Sexy Indian maidens, brooding Spaniards—more History Lite from the author of When We Were Gods (not reviewed).
The Conquistadors take a licking but keep on ticking.
Of course, that’s thanks to the intervention of the female slave Malinali, whose father prophesied the eventual downfall of the mighty lord of the Mexican people (Motecuhzoma’s personal representatives slaughtered the old man, and her jealous mother immediately sold Malinali into slavery). Her father always told Malinali that her destiny was disaster, that she is the drum who beats the sunset for Motecuhzoma, and that her future is with the gods—in particular with Feathered Serpent, who is expected to return any day now. Happily, Cortes more or less matches Feathered Serpent’s description, and Malinali is eager to interpret for the being she reveres as a god, though the hairy barbarians with him give her pause. Just for the hell of it, she puts a spin of her own on the words of both sides as she plots her revenge. The handsome Spaniard has a feeling she’s up to something, but her fathomless black eyes aren’t giving away any secrets. Cortes, no fool, assigns her and her girlfriends to deserving officers for some sensual R&R while he figures out what to do next. Chiefs and priests throw themselves at his feet, offering priceless gifts to appease the returned immortals, though some of the sneakier tribespeople observe that the supposed gods defecate in the woods just like mortal men. Cortes cares not a fig for the fine-feathered capes or bolts of cotton cloth, but the gold figurines get him excited indeed. Off to Tenochtitlan he goes to investigate the possibilities of plunder and terrorize the natives, and Malinali comes along to interpret some more and explain colorful local customs like tearing out people’s hearts and eating maggots. The sanctimonious Conquistadors are properly appalled and promptly run amok in various battles, eventually claiming the benighted land for Charles V and Christianity.
Sexy Indian maidens, brooding Spaniards—more History Lite from the author of When We Were Gods (not reviewed).Pub Date: Dec. 1, 2002
ISBN: 0-609-61029-5
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2002
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 phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.
Four men who meet as college roommates move to New York and spend the next three decades gaining renown in their professions—as an architect, painter, actor and lawyer—and struggling with demons in their intertwined personal lives.
Yanagihara (The People in the Trees, 2013) takes the still-bold leap of writing about characters who don’t share her background; in addition to being male, JB is African-American, Malcolm has a black father and white mother, Willem is white, and “Jude’s race was undetermined”—deserted at birth, he was raised in a monastery and had an unspeakably traumatic childhood that’s revealed slowly over the course of the book. Two of them are gay, one straight and one bisexual. There isn’t a single significant female character, and for a long novel, there isn’t much plot. There aren’t even many markers of what’s happening in the outside world; Jude moves to a loft in SoHo as a young man, but we don’t see the neighborhood change from gritty artists’ enclave to glitzy tourist destination. What we get instead is an intensely interior look at the friends’ psyches and relationships, and it’s utterly enthralling. The four men think about work and creativity and success and failure; they cook for each other, compete with each other and jostle for each other’s affection. JB bases his entire artistic career on painting portraits of his friends, while Malcolm takes care of them by designing their apartments and houses. When Jude, as an adult, is adopted by his favorite Harvard law professor, his friends join him for Thanksgiving in Cambridge every year. And when Willem becomes a movie star, they all bask in his glow. Eventually, the tone darkens and the story narrows to focus on Jude as the pain of his past cuts deep into his carefully constructed life.
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.Pub Date: March 10, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-385-53925-8
Page Count: 720
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Dec. 21, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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