A quietly acerbic overview of 20th-century Sweden from the perspective of someone nobody expected to live to see it.
This first novel from the creator of Kurt Wallender (An Event in Autumn, 2014, etc.), originally published in 1973, makes its English-language debut.
A 1911 explosion so nearly kills Oskar Johansson, the youngest member of a team placing and detonating dynamite for construction projects, that the local newspaper reports his death. Against all odds, however, he survives, minus one eye, one hand, several fingers, and half his penis. The frightful accident changes Oskar forever—or does it? Banished from his father’s house a year before the accident because of his interest in socialism, he moved in with like-minded colleague Magnus Nilsson and joined the Social Democratic Party. His visits in the hospital from Elly Lundgren, the young woman with whom he’s been keeping company, taper off and come to an end, and eventually he marries her sister, Elvira, with whom he maintains he’s found perfect harmony. The sexual urges he thought had finished return to him, and he fathers a son and two daughters. Years pass, marked by a highly characteristic parade of public events, private reflections, prose poetry, and prickly asides that will sound familiar to readers of Mankell’s memoir Quicksand (2017). Disenchanted by the failure of socialism to keep its promises to workers, a disillusionment that reflects the author’s own, Oskar leaves the SDP. His son expands his chain of laundries. His wife dies. He moves one last time, watches the summer come and go, shares some of his reminiscences with a faceless narrator but keeps others to himself, and suffers further reversals to his health before he finally dies in 1969, not long after turning 80. Although he’s known throughout his adult life as the man who survived a disfiguring accident, his own attitude is more stoic: “I don’t have much in the way of hands, but I can still pitch in.”
A quietly acerbic overview of 20th-century Sweden from the perspective of someone nobody expected to live to see it.Pub Date: Feb. 18, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-525-56616-8
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Vintage
Review Posted Online: Nov. 23, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 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
A tour de force.
In 1974, a troubled Vietnam vet inherits a house from a fallen comrade and moves his family to Alaska.
After years as a prisoner of war, Ernt Allbright returned home to his wife, Cora, and daughter, Leni, a violent, difficult, restless man. The family moved so frequently that 13-year-old Leni went to five schools in four years. But when they move to Alaska, still very wild and sparsely populated, Ernt finds a landscape as raw as he is. As Leni soon realizes, “Everyone up here had two stories: the life before and the life now. If you wanted to pray to a weirdo god or live in a school bus or marry a goose, no one in Alaska was going to say crap to you.” There are many great things about this book—one of them is its constant stream of memorably formulated insights about Alaska. Another key example is delivered by Large Marge, a former prosecutor in Washington, D.C., who now runs the general store for the community of around 30 brave souls who live in Kaneq year-round. As she cautions the Allbrights, “Alaska herself can be Sleeping Beauty one minute and a bitch with a sawed-off shotgun the next. There’s a saying: Up here you can make one mistake. The second one will kill you.” Hannah’s (The Nightingale, 2015, etc.) follow-up to her series of blockbuster bestsellers will thrill her fans with its combination of Greek tragedy, Romeo and Juliet–like coming-of-age story, and domestic potboiler. She re-creates in magical detail the lives of Alaska's homesteaders in both of the state's seasons (they really only have two) and is just as specific and authentic in her depiction of the spiritual wounds of post-Vietnam America.
A tour de force.Pub Date: Feb. 6, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-312-57723-0
Page Count: 448
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Oct. 30, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2017
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