Oblique, extraordinarily ambitious attempt to articulate the unspeakable.
Published in Germany in 1962, this difficult, neglected Holocaust novel is the first work by Adler (1910–88) to be translated into English.
A secular Jew from Prague, a camp survivor who wrote in German, the author refused to be categorized in his 26 books, which included fiction, poetry, philosophy and history. The same bold unconventionality is evident in this unusual novel, which begins with roundups in the fictional town of Stupart, Germany. Messengers deliver a printed message: “Thou shalt not dwell among us!” The arrested people, for whom everything is now “forbidden,” are taken on trains to Leitenberg, a way station, before being shipped to Ruhenthal—modeled on the slave community of Theresienstadt, where Adler spent two and a half years, according to translator Filkins’s excellent introduction. Their trajectory is obscured and muddied by narrative shifts, time loops, feints, euphemisms, contradictions and ventures into the surreal. Irony is pervasive. There are no references to Jews or Nazis. Instead there are the powerful, the powerless and the bystanders, all caught up in this “epidemic of mental illness.” The occasional use of words like crematorium and extermination startles like a gunshot. Intermittently discernible through the fog of mass murder is the Lustig family. Leopold Lustig, a 75-year-old doctor, is driven out of Stupart with his wife Caroline, sister-in-law Ida and grown children Zerlina and Paul. All are sketchily characterized—after all, they are “ghosts,” more numbers than names. Leopold dies from starvation. Zerlina, by now a hybrid rabbit/woman, is allowed an impassioned swan song before being consumed by flames (or people, take your pick). Paul is the only survivor. In the final third, the novel settles into an orderly progression with a consistent viewpoint: Paul’s. His efforts to get help for the sick survivors are dismissed by the American liberators, acerbically portrayed by Adler. Paul’s one minor triumph is to get his name back, on new ID.
Oblique, extraordinarily ambitious attempt to articulate the unspeakable.Pub Date: Nov. 11, 2008
ISBN: 978-1-4000-6673-5
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2008
BOOK REVIEW
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 phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.
Four men who meet as college roommates move to New York and spend the next three decades gaining renown in their professions—as an architect, painter, actor and lawyer—and struggling with demons in their intertwined personal lives.
Yanagihara (The People in the Trees, 2013) takes the still-bold leap of writing about characters who don’t share her background; in addition to being male, JB is African-American, Malcolm has a black father and white mother, Willem is white, and “Jude’s race was undetermined”—deserted at birth, he was raised in a monastery and had an unspeakably traumatic childhood that’s revealed slowly over the course of the book. Two of them are gay, one straight and one bisexual. There isn’t a single significant female character, and for a long novel, there isn’t much plot. There aren’t even many markers of what’s happening in the outside world; Jude moves to a loft in SoHo as a young man, but we don’t see the neighborhood change from gritty artists’ enclave to glitzy tourist destination. What we get instead is an intensely interior look at the friends’ psyches and relationships, and it’s utterly enthralling. The four men think about work and creativity and success and failure; they cook for each other, compete with each other and jostle for each other’s affection. JB bases his entire artistic career on painting portraits of his friends, while Malcolm takes care of them by designing their apartments and houses. When Jude, as an adult, is adopted by his favorite Harvard law professor, his friends join him for Thanksgiving in Cambridge every year. And when Willem becomes a movie star, they all bask in his glow. Eventually, the tone darkens and the story narrows to focus on Jude as the pain of his past cuts deep into his carefully constructed life.
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.Pub Date: March 10, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-385-53925-8
Page Count: 720
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Dec. 21, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
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