A thrilling and provocative portrait of a powerful woman set against a sweeping panorama of Iranian history.
Unclean, unholy, immodest, disruptive—Forugh Farrokhzad endures the scorn of her family and society to become one of Iran’s most prominent poets and a film director in this debut novel based on her real life.
From the rise of the repressive Pahlavi dynasty to the 1953 coup bringing Mosaddegh to power, martial law in 1979 , and the beginnings of revolution, Darznik (The Good Daughter: A Memoir of My Mother's Hidden Life, 2011) weaves remnants of Forugh’s real poetry through this bewitching tale of a woman transcending the strictures of a patriarchal society. There is no shortage of villains, including her domineering and abusive father, who insisted that even his children call him The Colonel. The novel opens with a troubling scene, as Forugh’s mother ushers her to the shabby outskirts of Tehran to determine whether she is still a virgin. The virginity test comes like a rape to Forugh, leaving her shaken and setting the stage for disaster. Constantly seeking a way to play on the same field as men, Forugh discovers poetry, and her first poem commands even The Colonel’s attention. Once her passion begins to show, however, his support abruptly ends, and her parents arrange a marriage to Parviz, who turns cold on their wedding night, rejecting her after seeing no blood on their sheets. A year later, stifled by her mother-in-law and disappointed in her husband, Forugh sneaks off to Tehran to find a publisher for her poetry, Nasser Khodayar, who becomes her lover as well. Recklessly publishing her first poem, “Sin,” under her own name, Forugh sets in motion a cascade of events that will lead her to become an independent artist. But the path is long and twists through a mental asylum and divorce as well as the highs of love and showing her first documentary and the lows of social humiliations and prison.
A thrilling and provocative portrait of a powerful woman set against a sweeping panorama of Iranian history.Pub Date: Feb. 13, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-399-18231-0
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: Nov. 27, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2017
BOOK REVIEW
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
Jonathan Livingston Kitty, it’s not.
A lonely postman learns that he’s about to die—and reflects on life as he bargains with a Hawaiian-shirt–wearing devil.
The 30-year-old first-person narrator in filmmaker/novelist Kawamura’s slim novel is, by his own admission, “boring…a monotone guy,” so unimaginative that, when he learns he has a brain tumor, the bucket list he writes down is dull enough that “even the cat looked disgusted with me.” Luckily—or maybe not—a friendly devil, dubbed Aloha, pops onto the scene, and he’s willing to make a deal: an extra day of life in exchange for being allowed to remove something pleasant from the world. The first thing excised is phones, which goes well enough. (The narrator is pleasantly surprised to find that “people seemed to have no problem finding something to fill up their free time.”) But deals with the devil do have a way of getting complicated. This leads to shallow musings (“Sometimes, when you rewatch a film after not having seen it for a long time, it makes a totally different impression on you than it did the first time you saw it. Of course, the movie hasn’t changed; it’s you who’s changed") written in prose so awkward, it’s possibly satire (“Tears dripped down onto the letter like warm, salty drops of rain”). Even the postman’s beloved cat, who gains the power of speech, ends up being prim and annoying. The narrator ponders feelings about a lost love, his late mother, and his estranged father in a way that some readers might find moving at times. But for many, whatever made this book a bestseller in Japan is going to be lost in translation.
Jonathan Livingston Kitty, it’s not.Pub Date: March 12, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-250-29405-0
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Flatiron Books
Review Posted Online: Feb. 16, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2019
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