Dunmore (With Your Crooked Heart, 2000, etc.) has a gift for telling her tale in the rhythm of war and suffering, but less...
A small knot of people fight to survive the Nazi siege of Leningrad in a book that feels more like history than it does like a novel.
In the summer of 1941, twenty-two-year-old Anna Levin is staying with her father, Mikhail, at his small dacha outside Leningrad, where Anna keeps watch over her five-year-old brother Kolya. Mikhail is a writer whose lack of political acuity has made him unpublishable; and this failure, along with the recent loss of his wife, has made him into a premature invalid. Anna doesn’t have much drive, either. She watches after the family, does some drawing, takes care of the garden, and, like everyone else, makes sure to voice politically correct enthusiasms for Comrade Stalin so that the men in black vans won’t show up in the middle of the night to take them away. Then, she hears the unbelievable news of a German assault on Russia, and the story begins its lockstep march from the tensions of peacetime to the horrors of war. Despite everyone’s protestations that the Fascists will never get anywhere near Leningrad, the nearer they come. Anna and her family move into the city so as not to be cut off. They are joined in their small apartment by Marina, an actress who fell from political grace years ago and was also a mistress of Mikhail’s; and Andrei, a young doctor who quickly falls for Anna. As the temperature drops, so does hope. The brutal winter makes an already-unbearable situation worse, and soon people are making soup out of bread and water and praying for an end to winter.
Dunmore (With Your Crooked Heart, 2000, etc.) has a gift for telling her tale in the rhythm of war and suffering, but less of one for releasing the springs of a novel. Still, mixing an easy lyricism with gruesome honesty, she shows us what life is like for civilians in war—praying for help, saving the last crust of bread.Pub Date: Jan. 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-8021-1700-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Grove
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2001
A first novel, this is also a first person account of Scout's (Jean Louise) recall of the years that led to the ending of a mystery, the breaking of her brother Jem's elbow, the death of her father's enemy — and the close of childhood years. A widower, Atticus raises his children with legal dispassion and paternal intelligence, and is ably abetted by Calpurnia, the colored cook, while the Alabama town of Maycomb, in the 1930's, remains aloof to their divergence from its tribal patterns. Scout and Jem, with their summer-time companion, Dill, find their paths free from interference — but not from dangers; their curiosity about the imprisoned Boo, whose miserable past is incorporated in their play, results in a tentative friendliness; their fears of Atticus' lack of distinction is dissipated when he shoots a mad dog; his defense of a Negro accused of raping a white girl, Mayella Ewell, is followed with avid interest and turns the rabble whites against him. Scout is the means of averting an attack on Atticus but when he loses the case it is Boo who saves Jem and Scout by killing Mayella's father when he attempts to murder them. The shadows of a beginning for black-white understanding, the persistent fight that Scout carries on against school, Jem's emergence into adulthood, Calpurnia's quiet power, and all the incidents touching on the children's "growing outward" have an attractive starchiness that keeps this southern picture pert and provocative. There is much advance interest in this book; it has been selected by the Literary Guild and Reader's Digest; it should win many friends.
Pub Date: July 11, 1960
ISBN: 0060935464
Page Count: 323
Publisher: Lippincott
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1960
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
Coelho's placebo has racked up impressive sales in Brazil and Europe. Americans should flock to it like gulls.
Coelho is a Brazilian writer with four books to his credit. Following Diary of a Magus (1992—not reviewed) came this book, published in Brazil in 1988: it's an interdenominational, transcendental, inspirational fable—in other words, a bag of wind.
The story is about a youth empowered to follow his dream. Santiago is an Andalusian shepherd boy who learns through a dream of a treasure in the Egyptian pyramids. An old man, the king of Salem, the first of various spiritual guides, tells the boy that he has discovered his destiny: "to realize one's destiny is a person's only real obligation." So Santiago sells his sheep, sails to Tangier, is tricked out of his money, regains it through hard work, crosses the desert with a caravan, stops at an oasis long enough to fall in love, escapes from warring tribesmen by performing a miracle, reaches the pyramids, and eventually gets both the gold and the girl. Along the way he meets an Englishman who describes the Soul of the World; the desert woman Fatima, who teaches him the Language of the World; and an alchemist who says, "Listen to your heart" A message clings like ivy to every encounter; everyone, but everyone, has to put in their two cents' worth, from the crystal merchant to the camel driver ("concentrate always on the present, you'll be a happy man"). The absence of characterization and overall blandness suggest authorship by a committee of self-improvement pundits—a far cry from Saint- Exupery's The Little Prince: that flagship of the genre was a genuine charmer because it clearly derived from a quirky, individual sensibility.
Coelho's placebo has racked up impressive sales in Brazil and Europe. Americans should flock to it like gulls.Pub Date: July 1, 1993
ISBN: 0-06-250217-4
Page Count: 192
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1993
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
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