A challenging consideration of a murderous history by a knowing witness.
Von Rezzori’s vast roman à clef The Death of My Brother Abel, first published in English in 1985, is given extra heft with the addition of a couple of hundred pages of posthumous postscript—prequel, that is.
In the first iteration of his novel, von Rezzori opens with a provocative scene in which a streetwalker tells the secret for dealing with the inevitable what’s-a-nice-girl-like-you question: “I’ve got six different versions in stock,” she says, “all of them very believable.” So it is with all the players in this often perplexing book, to which has been added Cain: The Last Manuscript, published in German in 2001: The voices shift among the protagonist, the author Aristide Subics, and his editor, Schwab, whose name is similar enough to provoke suspicion; from time to time other characters take over. Subics is working away over a mountain of notes on a story of his own, recalling the challenge of an American agent: “Okay then, tell me a story, if possible in three short sentences.” That’s impossible, of course: Just getting to a short period of Subics’ childhood in a part of Romania later swallowed up by the Soviet Union takes pages to tease out, and then there’s the rise of Hitler, the Anschluss, the war, and all that comes after, from the “denunciations, self-abasement before the victors, begging for cigarettes and chocolate, turning tricks for nylons, and so on” of the Occupation to the economic miracle of the 1960s. Throughout, von Rezzori’s characters are ironic and elusive: if Cain killed Abel, then brother after brother has had no trouble killing in the countless generations since, and for all the usual reasons: “I mean, everyone for his ideals, of course. For the Folk and Fatherland. For his traditions.” Von Rezzori’s book is episodic, with stories sometimes breaking off in the middle, always with an odd poetry (“and I watched the grand spectacle purely through indolently squinting eyes") that finds beauty even in the most terrible destruction.
A challenging consideration of a murderous history by a knowing witness.Pub Date: March 5, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-68137-325-6
Page Count: 882
Publisher: New York Review Books
Review Posted Online: Dec. 10, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 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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