An intimate exploration of the unknown territory of desire, destruction, and whatever falls in between.
A young woman’s twin impulses toward sex and death merge into a duty to life in this lush English-translation debut.
The narrator of this lithe, prismatic book is unapologetic about her frank lesbian sexuality. She is a lover, an ardent explorer of the sensual, a student of bodies—including her own—who remains uninterested in the empty moralizing of middle-class values. Born in Barcelona to a family with a deeply neurotic mother, a distant father, and a younger sister interested in fulfilling all the gender norms of womanhood, the narrator struggles not with her sexual orientation but rather with the essential absurdity of a life lived in search of speciously defined material success. Convinced by her mother to get a degree in art history, rather than pursue the urge to create, the narrator spends her post-degree years immersed in books, which she understands as a sort of pleasurable abnegation of the self. She also travels, first leaving Barcelona for a stint as a Spanish tutor in Brussels, where she meets the incomparable Veronika, whose “thick, silken hair...remind[s her] of the surreal bundles of fiber optics that a technician had once threaded through the façade of [her] Barcelona apartment”; spending a brief time as an au pair in Scotland, where she feels that the “anomalous, flat and rich” green of the Scottish landscape “rises like a suffocating tide, floods every cavity, and colonizes the most fertile parts of my ego”; and returning home to Barcelona to eventually settle into work writing articles for a publication that makes her feel “colorless—a dreadful muddle of various hues, an unthinkably grim and grayish green.” Throughout, the narrator is obsessed not only with the physicality of her lovers and the pleasure she finds in their bodies, but also with the solace she perceives in thoughts of death. She has multiple near suicide attempts which are unconsummated not due to a lack of seriousness but rather due to external factors. The narrator seems likely to continue on this way, drifting between lovers and suicide attempts in a lucid swoon of sensation, were it not for the sudden illness of her 6-year old niece, Clàudia, which thrusts her into the unanticipated experience of wonder and reciprocal trust. Prior to this novel, Baltasar published 10 books of poetry in her native Catalan, and her poet’s sense of language as musculature—a body in its own right—flexes in every line of the carefully translated prose.
An intimate exploration of the unknown territory of desire, destruction, and whatever falls in between.Pub Date: April 6, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-91150-875-5
Page Count: 128
Publisher: And Other Stories
Review Posted Online: March 2, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2021
PERSPECTIVES
A dramatic, vividly detailed reconstruction of a little-known aspect of the Vietnam War.
A young woman’s experience as a nurse in Vietnam casts a deep shadow over her life.
When we learn that the farewell party in the opening scene is for Frances “Frankie” McGrath’s older brother—“a golden boy, a wild child who could make the hardest heart soften”—who is leaving to serve in Vietnam in 1966, we feel pretty certain that poor Finley McGrath is marked for death. Still, it’s a surprise when the fateful doorbell rings less than 20 pages later. His death inspires his sister to enlist as an Army nurse, and this turn of events is just the beginning of a roller coaster of a plot that’s impressive and engrossing if at times a bit formulaic. Hannah renders the experiences of the young women who served in Vietnam in all-encompassing detail. The first half of the book, set in gore-drenched hospital wards, mildewed dorm rooms, and boozy officers’ clubs, is an exciting read, tracking the transformation of virginal, uptight Frankie into a crack surgical nurse and woman of the world. Her tensely platonic romance with a married surgeon ends when his broken, unbreathing body is airlifted out by helicopter; she throws her pent-up passion into a wild affair with a soldier who happens to be her dead brother’s best friend. In the second part of the book, after the war, Frankie seems to experience every possible bad break. A drawback of the story is that none of the secondary characters in her life are fully three-dimensional: Her dismissive, chauvinistic father and tight-lipped, pill-popping mother, her fellow nurses, and her various love interests are more plot devices than people. You’ll wish you could have gone to Vegas and placed a bet on the ending—while it’s against all the odds, you’ll see it coming from a mile away.
A dramatic, vividly detailed reconstruction of a little-known aspect of the Vietnam War.Pub Date: Feb. 6, 2024
ISBN: 9781250178633
Page Count: 480
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Nov. 4, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2023
PERSPECTIVES
BOOK TO SCREEN
SEEN & HEARD
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
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