Graphic in its violence but rich in history and psychology, this novel is vivid proof that “after the war, sometimes the war...
This is a bleak tale of personal vengeance set in Bordeaux, France, where memories of the German occupation remain fresh in the late 1950s as the country faces a new conflict in Algeria.
French writer Le Corre (Talking to Ghosts, 2014, etc.), known for his crime fiction, has the basics of the genre at work here while history supplies characters and motives. Andre Vaillant has returned to his hometown in Bordeaux in 1958 seeking revenge against Police Superintendent Albert Darlac, who betrayed him during World War II. In a plot with several narrative streams and expansive psychological portraits, Le Corre gradually reveals Vaillant’s experiences at Auschwitz and during a postwar period in Paris before he comes home with plans to hurt people tied to Darlac. Vaillant’s son, Daniel, whom he was forced to leave behind during the war, copes with military life in Algeria in some of the novel’s most compelling scenes. At the center of everything is the monstrous Darlac, who controls much of Bordeaux’s illicit activities with favors and sadism, as he did during the occupation, when “all cops were collaborators.” It’s an ambitious work, and Le Corre doesn’t entirely succeed in melding the many parts into a cohesive whole, but even somewhat digressive segments enrich characters and themes. Meanwhile, the police are busy with a string of murders, all blamed on Vaillant but not all committed by him. The other culprit is Darlac, who uses the investigation to mask killings he commits for his personal agenda: one cop, two henchmen, and two people close to home. He also beats and rapes his wife and barely controls his passion for their 15-year-old daughter. His unrelenting cruelty is excessive, as is Le Corre’s prose at times, but the writing is generally high-end noir or better and well served by the translation.
Graphic in its violence but rich in history and psychology, this novel is vivid proof that “after the war, sometimes the war continues.”Pub Date: Sept. 24, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-60945-539-2
Page Count: 544
Publisher: Europa Editions
Review Posted Online: June 30, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 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
Doerr captures the sights and sounds of wartime and focuses, refreshingly, on the innate goodness of his major characters.
Doerr presents us with two intricate stories, both of which take place during World War II; late in the novel, inevitably, they intersect.
In August 1944, Marie-Laure LeBlanc is a blind 16-year-old living in the walled port city of Saint-Malo in Brittany and hoping to escape the effects of Allied bombing. D-Day took place two months earlier, and Cherbourg, Caen and Rennes have already been liberated. She’s taken refuge in this city with her great-uncle Etienne, at first a fairly frightening figure to her. Marie-Laure’s father was a locksmith and craftsman who made scale models of cities that Marie-Laure studied so she could travel around on her own. He also crafted clever and intricate boxes, within which treasures could be hidden. Parallel to the story of Marie-Laure we meet Werner and Jutta Pfennig, a brother and sister, both orphans who have been raised in the Children’s House outside Essen, in Germany. Through flashbacks we learn that Werner had been a curious and bright child who developed an obsession with radio transmitters and receivers, both in their infancies during this period. Eventually, Werner goes to a select technical school and then, at 18, into the Wehrmacht, where his technical aptitudes are recognized and he’s put on a team trying to track down illegal radio transmissions. Etienne and Marie-Laure are responsible for some of these transmissions, but Werner is intrigued since what she’s broadcasting is innocent—she shares her passion for Jules Verne by reading aloud 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea. A further subplot involves Marie-Laure’s father’s having hidden a valuable diamond, one being tracked down by Reinhold von Rumpel, a relentless German sergeant-major.
Doerr captures the sights and sounds of wartime and focuses, refreshingly, on the innate goodness of his major characters.Pub Date: May 6, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-4767-4658-6
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: March 5, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2014
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
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