The command of tone and voice sustains tension until the very last page of a novel that will long resonate in the reader’s...
A simple Holocaust story presents a complex moral equation.
The first work by this French author to be translated into English, this short novel from 2012 packs a punch. The narrator is apparently a German soldier stationed in Poland during a very cold winter of World War II. His camp’s main mission seems to be the extermination of Jews by capturing and shooting them. The narrator and his two comrades have no stomach for the killing, but their only recourse is to go searching for Jews in the countryside and bring them back instead. “We would rather do the hunting than the shootings,” he tells his base commander, a reservist like him, in the plainspoken, matter-of-fact diction that characterizes the narrative and adds to its chilling conclusion. “We told him we didn’t like the shootings: that doing it made us feel bad at the time and gave us bad dreams at night.” So the narrator and his two very different compatriots embark on a long, frigid search, and they in fact encounter a “Jew,” the first time this word is used, a third of the way into the novel. Despite a language barrier, they communicate that they are bringing him back to camp. Much of the second half of the novel finds the three soldiers and their captive in a deserted hovel where they find temporary refuge from the cold: “The house appeared from behind a row of trees. We didn’t need to talk about it. The decision was made by our stomachs and the icy sky.” They then face a number of other survival decisions: how to cook, eat, and stay warm. The intrusion of a Polish hunter from the countryside further complicates their situation. Though another language barrier presents itself, it is obvious that the Pole’s hatred of the Jew is more intense than anything the soldiers feel. As they spend time and share food together, the captors experience some subtle shifts. Over the course of “the strangest meal we ever had in Poland,” the narrator and his cohort wrestle with the morality of delivering their captive to camp.
The command of tone and voice sustains tension until the very last page of a novel that will long resonate in the reader’s conscience.Pub Date: July 5, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-62097-173-4
Page Count: 144
Publisher: The New Press
Review Posted Online: April 12, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2016
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
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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