The author of The Frenchwoman (1989) and The Queen's War (1991) again imaginatively (but responsibly, judiciously) samples French history and here constructs a witty, lightly satirical, entertaining amalgam of murder, greed, and revenge, all peculiarly attached to a kind of treasure hunt for an ancient Egyptian stela— a slab of stone picturing the goddess Hathor (appropriately, the goddess of love and laughter). The story takes place in 1798 Cairo, during Napoleon Bonaparte's occupation of Egypt, with millennia-spanning stela- sightings in the fourth century b.c. and the fourth century a.d. At the start, Napoleon, glory-bound, is headed for Egypt, bringing along with his army a team of scholars to record the (generally unknown) history of Egypt and to find and claim its artifacts. Chief among the prizes is a stela thought to have once been owned by Alexander the Great. The panel, intended for a royal tomb, has a unique history: In 3737 b.c., a dying pharaoh had been robbed of immortality as the slab of stone destined to bear his name beside the image of the goddess Hathor (who would rescue him from death) was hidden by his nasty son-in-law. The pharaoh's daughter took revenge by means of a drink spiked with ground glass—a libation identical to one used in Napoleon's coffee during a dinner in Cairo. Luckily, the General refuses the drink, but a sheik's nephew dies. A young French couple, the Verdiers, banished to a temporary prison as suspects, ponder in Nick-and-Nora fashion: Who would try to knock off Napoleon? Meanwhile, there's a stela-hunt afoot. Among the hunters: a stone-eyed collector, Napoleon's doctor; the fiery Turkish widow of the sheik's nephew; a Turkish sheik hoping to bribe the fatuous collector Lord Elgin; Lord Elgin himself; and the Verdiers, hoping to return to Napoleon's good graces. There'll be night journeys, betrayals large and small, spying and mayhem. All this during the Nile's flooding, a ``season of charms and spells.'' A richly intelligent and charming spellbinder.
Pub Date: April 1, 1996
ISBN: 1-57566-020-2
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Kensington
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 1996
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
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
BOOK REVIEW
PROFILES
PERSPECTIVES
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