Though long and sometimes slow moving, the book has considerable merit, particularly for students of women’s literature of...
An epic tale of Italian life in the 20th century, as seen through the eyes of an indomitable woman.
Modesta is born into a land of heat and dust at the very dawn of that century: “The mountains always turn black as her hair when the heat lets up,” she recalls, “but when the heat intensifies they turn blue, like the Sunday dress that Mama is sewing for Tina.” It being rural Sicily, a land beyond the pale even of Carlo Levi’s Christ Stopped at Eboli, Modesta is brutalized before she is even of school age; the youngest, she does not even stand to receive hand-me-downs. When she’s packed off to a convent school where she’ll at least eat, she’s hardened for battle, but instead she finds—well, love of the sort that dare not speak its name. Modesta grows, becoming increasingly ungovernable even as Italy falls under the sway of fascism, unafraid to declare herself a socialist and resist the regime; with the passing years, she experiences all the normal loves and losses, compounded by her lack of interest in formal definitions of gender or institutions. It’s said that this long novel, which sometimes drifts into the politically doctrinaire (“The way you’re acting, you’re not merely showing respect for the Catholic electorate, you’re meeting it fully and distorting the very roots of our struggle”), is a definitive roman à clef recounting its author’s life, save that Sapienza enjoyed perhaps less success in her life than does Modesta, who enjoys a considerable reversal of fortune; for one thing, Sapienza, who died in 1996 and whose father was a devout anti-fascist, could not find a publisher for the book in her lifetime, and it appeared in Italy only in 2005. Readers without a grounding in Italian history will perhaps not appreciate fully the depth of Modesta’s struggle, while those who are familiar may find in the book a sort of worm’s-eye rejoinder to Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa’s The Leopard, narrated from the point of view of one not born to privilege.
Though long and sometimes slow moving, the book has considerable merit, particularly for students of women’s literature of the past century.Pub Date: July 30, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-374-10614-0
Page Count: 704
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: July 6, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2013
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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