Pensive and ponderous: a work of continental gloom that promises that no one gets out of here alive.
An elderly artist meets an elderly dandy in the late Croatian writer Drndić’s (EEG, 2019, etc.) brief but potent novel, and the rest is history‚ with all its inevitable tragedy.
Born in time to witness some of the worst episodes of the 20th century, Artur and Isabella are very different people, he “the greatest wearer of hats in this country,” she a quiet photographer who fled her native Germany decades earlier. They meet on a New Year’s Eve, and after a few hours together, they depart this life, statistics for a police ledger. All that is by way of prelude to Drndić’s larger story, centering on a melancholic fellow, aging but not elderly, named Pupi, who has an unusual attachment to the rhinos at the city zoo, “wild beasts, heavy beasts.” Pupi doesn’t much like the name he bears—he thinks of himself, Drndić writes, by his formal name, Printz, —and he doesn’t much like the life he is living, caring for an elderly father, nursing a variety of complaints, and collecting an odd assortment of facts for his notebook: The year of his birth, 1946, was, he calculates, also one in which numerous Nazis met their deaths: “Joachim von Ribbentrop, German war criminal, hung; Hans Frank, German war criminal, hung; Julius Streicher, German leader, hung; Wilhelm Keitel, German field-marshal, hung.“ Printz has odd little habits besides his obsessive collecting of facts, including pilfering things like food and bottles of wine from trade shows while excusing himself by noting that the French philosopher Louis Althusser did the same thing. Of course, Althusser also killed his wife, though Printz excuses him with the thought that “he helped her to kill herself because she wanted to kill herself.” That slender thread joins Isabella’s story to Printz’s, which ends as it began, in the company of rhinos—which is not necessarily a good thing.
Pensive and ponderous: a work of continental gloom that promises that no one gets out of here alive.Pub Date: Sept. 24, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-8112-2891-6
Page Count: 160
Publisher: New Directions
Review Posted Online: June 30, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2019
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
An illuminating read for anyone interested in the inner workings of the Catholic Church; for prelate-fiction superfans, it...
Harris, creator of grand, symphonic thrillers from Fatherland (1992) to An Officer and a Spy (2014), scores with a chamber piece of a novel set in the Vatican in the days after a fictional pope dies.
Fictional, yes, but the nameless pontiff has a lot in common with our own Francis: he’s famously humble, shunning the lavish Apostolic Palace for a small apartment, and he is committed to leading a church that engages with the world and its problems. In the aftermath of his sudden death, rumors circulate about the pope’s intention to fire certain cardinals. At the center of the action is Cardinal Lomeli, Dean of the College of Cardinals, whose job it is to manage the conclave that will elect a new pope. He believes it is also his duty to uncover what the pope knew before he died because some of the cardinals in question are in the running to succeed him. “In the running” is an apt phrase because, as described by Harris, the papal conclave is the ultimate political backroom—albeit a room, the Sistine Chapel, covered with Michelangelo frescoes. Vying for the papal crown are an African cardinal whom many want to see as the first black pope, a press-savvy Canadian, an Italian arch-conservative (think Cardinal Scalia), and an Italian liberal who wants to continue the late pope’s campaign to modernize the church. The novel glories in the ancient rituals that constitute the election process while still grounding that process in the real world: the Sistine Chapel is fitted with jamming devices to thwart electronic eavesdropping, and the pressure to act quickly is increased because “rumours that the pope is dead are already trending on social media.”
An illuminating read for anyone interested in the inner workings of the Catholic Church; for prelate-fiction superfans, it is pure temptation.Pub Date: Nov. 22, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-451-49344-6
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Sept. 6, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2016
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