Carefully, admirably crafted but, overall, unaffecting.
One of six finalists for the ManBooker 2003, originally scheduled to appear here in March 2004, but pushed forward: a highly accomplished but unmemorable post-apartheid story in which a young doctor’s best intentions end badly.
Set in a poor and remote part of South Africa that was formerly one of the notorious “homelands,” the tale is narrated by Frank Eloff, a doctor at a small and underused hospital. Frank is like the protagonists of so many stories about anomie and alienation, and the similarity makes the novel, despite its setting, more an intellectual cliché than an original. The hospital is headed by Dr. Ruth Ngema, who, having been promised a better posting, doesn’t want to jeopardize her chances by forcing improvements. Which means that there’s no response when thieves steal plumbing fixtures, and beds and buildings deteriorate. Frank, there because his wife ran off with his best friend and medical partner, takes a masochistic pleasure in living in this remote hellhole, where even the nearest town is dying. He also has a black mistress, Maria, who runs a dilapidated craft stall on the main road and is curiously reticent about the husband she claims to have. Accustomed to the tedium, Frank isn’t happy when he learns he’ll be sharing his room with newcomer Laurence Waters, a young doctor come to perform a year of community service. Laurence, an idealist bent on doing well, soon convinces Dr. Ngema, but not Frank, whose own ideals were lost while serving in the apartheid army, to set up clinics in the villages. The clinics are a huge success, but good intentions can’t compete with the realities of crime and corruption as the army arrives and sets up camp in the town. The soldiers are ostensibly there to track drug dealers, check corruption, and patrol the border for illegal crossings, but their activities seem increasingly more malevolent. A hospital worker is mysteriously wounded and nearly dies, and, on a night when Laurence is on duty, both he and his patient are abducted. Frank, too, soon finds his life dramatically changing.
Carefully, admirably crafted but, overall, unaffecting.Pub Date: Jan. 9, 2004
ISBN: 0-8021-1764-3
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Grove
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2003
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 Brat Pack meets The Bacchae in this precious, way-too-long, and utterly unsuspenseful town-and-gown murder tale. A bunch of ever-so-mandarin college kids in a small Vermont school are the eager epigones of an aloof classics professor, and in their exclusivity and snobbishness and eagerness to please their teacher, they are moved to try to enact Dionysian frenzies in the woods. During the only one that actually comes off, a local farmer happens upon them—and they kill him. But the death isn't ruled a murder—and might never have been if one of the gang—a cadging sybarite named Bunny Corcoran—hadn't shown signs of cracking under the secret's weight. And so he too is dispatched. The narrator, a blank-slate Californian named Richard Pepen chronicles the coverup. But if you're thinking remorse-drama, conscience masque, or even semi-trashy who'll-break-first? page-turner, forget it: This is a straight gee-whiz, first-to-have-ever-noticed college novel—"Hampden College, as a body, was always strangely prone to hysteria. Whether from isolation, malice, or simple boredom, people there were far more credulous and excitable than educated people are generally thought to be, and this hermetic, overheated atmosphere made it a thriving black petri dish of melodrama and distortion." First-novelist Tartt goes muzzy when she has to describe human confrontations (the murder, or sex, or even the ping-ponging of fear), and is much more comfortable in transcribing aimless dorm-room paranoia or the TV shows that the malefactors anesthetize themselves with as fate ticks down. By telegraphing the murders, Tartt wants us to be continually horrified at these kids—while inviting us to semi-enjoy their manneristic fetishes and refined tastes. This ersatz-Fitzgerald mix of moralizing and mirror-looking (Jay McInerney shook and poured the shaker first) is very 80's—and in Tartt's strenuous version already seems dated, formulaic. Les Nerds du Mal—and about as deep (if not nearly as involving) as a TV movie.
Pub Date: Sept. 16, 1992
ISBN: 1400031702
Page Count: 592
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1992
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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