In equal parts passionate and stylistically confined, an ambitious effort that never quite soars beyond its method.
After Dear Future (1996), D’Aguiar exhibits a decline—of execution, not passion—in this verse-novel about a black-white love affair in the slave world of the Civil War era.
When a white plantation son rapes a young black slave, the result is a blossoming of love that might never have been expected but that grows and flourishes as doomed love affairs always have and always will. Impossible that the lovers remain in the South, Faith and Christy make a try for freedom in the north, turning to the services of the rustic but dedicated idealists and hermit-like love-couple Tom and Stella—but when Tom paddles them down river under cover of night, a vicious ambush awaits them, and the couple’s panicked attempt to flee ends only in a gruesome scene of Faith being repeatedly raped, Christy forced to watch, after which the two are separated forever. Christy—starting with his fighting each of the rapists in turn—drifts into the pitifully numbing life of a professional boxer while Faith, dying in childbirth (she’s 17), bears the orphan son (“My earthly father white, / my mother, black”) who subsequently tells this entire agonized tale. In some stretches, D’Aguiar manages to maintain an intensity that lets the reader forget the artifice of the whole being told in eight-line stanzas—most especially, perhaps, in the Civil War section (“history is shelves of human spines in the dark”)—but elsewhere the story slows to all but a stop while an increasingly hyperbolized rhetoric fails to take up the slack (“avoiding the whip, stick and chain is their goal, / with their skin as a badge of anxiety”) and tortured rhymes take over (“woe was me, / I was without a mom and dad, have pity”), or feminine rhymes become inadvertently risible (“a crack in the armature / invisible to untrained eyes, that feeds / on our discontent and gives it imprimatur”).
In equal parts passionate and stylistically confined, an ambitious effort that never quite soars beyond its method.Pub Date: July 25, 2001
ISBN: 1-58567-156-8
Page Count: 160
Publisher: Overlook
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2001
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
Inspired by disclosures of a real-life Florida reform school’s long-standing corruption and abusive practices, Whitehead’s...
The acclaimed author of The Underground Railroad (2016) follows up with a leaner, meaner saga of Deep South captivity set in the mid-20th century and fraught with horrors more chilling for being based on true-life atrocities.
Elwood Curtis is a law-abiding, teenage paragon of rectitude, an avid reader of encyclopedias and after-school worker diligently overcoming hardships that come from being abandoned by his parents and growing up black and poor in segregated Tallahassee, Florida. It’s the early 1960s, and Elwood can feel changes coming every time he listens to an LP of his hero Martin Luther King Jr. sermonizing about breaking down racial barriers. But while hitchhiking to his first day of classes at a nearby black college, Elwood accepts a ride in what turns out to be a stolen car and is sentenced to the Nickel Academy, a juvenile reformatory that looks somewhat like the campus he’d almost attended but turns out to be a monstrously racist institution whose students, white and black alike, are brutally beaten, sexually abused, and used by the school’s two-faced officials to steal food and supplies. At first, Elwood thinks he can work his way past the arbitrary punishments and sadistic treatment (“I am stuck here, but I’ll make the best of it…and I’ll make it brief”). He befriends another black inmate, a street-wise kid he knows only as Turner, who has a different take on withstanding Nickel: “The key to in here is the same as surviving out there—you got to see how people act, and then you got to figure out how to get around them like an obstacle course.” And if you defy them, Turner warns, you’ll get taken “out back” and are never seen or heard from again. Both Elwood’s idealism and Turner’s cynicism entwine into an alliance that compels drastic action—and a shared destiny. There's something a tad more melodramatic in this book's conception (and resolution) than one expects from Whitehead, giving it a drugstore-paperback glossiness that enhances its blunt-edged impact.
Inspired by disclosures of a real-life Florida reform school’s long-standing corruption and abusive practices, Whitehead’s novel displays its author’s facility with violent imagery and his skill at weaving narrative strands into an ingenious if disquieting whole.Pub Date: July 16, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-385-53707-0
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Jan. 20, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2019
PERSPECTIVES
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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