Science-fiction writer Haldeman (Worlds Enough and Time, 1992, etc.) unsuccessfully grinds a big political ax on too small a stone, in a novel about the traumas of the Vietnam War—also the subject of his first non-sf novel, The War, in 1972. Spider begins his Vietnam tour as a clerk in Graves Registration, but is soon sent to the jungles. He carries a rifle that doesn't work, has no real friends, and little control over his life. Not surprisingly, he expects to die in Vietnam, while, back home, girlfriend Beverly struggles against an increasingly repressive society. Her letters to Spider try to mask both the political tenor of the country and her rejection of their former life together. Meanwhile, Spider begins to doubt his own sanity. The only survivor when his squad is wiped out, this young soldier is physically unharmed, but his mind is broken. He's sent stateside, to a psychiatric unit at Walter Reed Hospital, where he's not so much cured as experimented upon. Once released, Spider returns home to Bethesda, Maryland, and enrolls in college. But all his attempts at living a normal life fail, since he's suffering from post-traumatic shock syndrome. Spider tries, but he's unable to reconnect with Beverly, who by now is moving around the country and protesting the war. Throughout, Spider and Beverly take a psychological beating, although they do find some small redemptions (Spider in his music and newfound friends, Beverly in being briefly reunited with her mother). No such luck, however, for the reader, since the story has long since disintegrated—beginning about a third of the way in—under the weight of polemics (the military is bad, the government is bad, people are bad, etc.) and undeveloped characters. You'd like to feel for Spider, but every time you begin to, Haldeman wades in with a heavy-handed aside, destroying the novel's rhythm and integrity. With surprisingly scant tension given the subject matter, Haldeman, himself awarded a Purple Heart in Vietnam, offers too much political treatise and too little below the surface of his characters' lives.
Pub Date: June 1, 1995
ISBN: 0-688-09023-0
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 1995
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
Coelho's placebo has racked up impressive sales in Brazil and Europe. Americans should flock to it like gulls.
Coelho is a Brazilian writer with four books to his credit. Following Diary of a Magus (1992—not reviewed) came this book, published in Brazil in 1988: it's an interdenominational, transcendental, inspirational fable—in other words, a bag of wind.
The story is about a youth empowered to follow his dream. Santiago is an Andalusian shepherd boy who learns through a dream of a treasure in the Egyptian pyramids. An old man, the king of Salem, the first of various spiritual guides, tells the boy that he has discovered his destiny: "to realize one's destiny is a person's only real obligation." So Santiago sells his sheep, sails to Tangier, is tricked out of his money, regains it through hard work, crosses the desert with a caravan, stops at an oasis long enough to fall in love, escapes from warring tribesmen by performing a miracle, reaches the pyramids, and eventually gets both the gold and the girl. Along the way he meets an Englishman who describes the Soul of the World; the desert woman Fatima, who teaches him the Language of the World; and an alchemist who says, "Listen to your heart" A message clings like ivy to every encounter; everyone, but everyone, has to put in their two cents' worth, from the crystal merchant to the camel driver ("concentrate always on the present, you'll be a happy man"). The absence of characterization and overall blandness suggest authorship by a committee of self-improvement pundits—a far cry from Saint- Exupery's The Little Prince: that flagship of the genre was a genuine charmer because it clearly derived from a quirky, individual sensibility.
Coelho's placebo has racked up impressive sales in Brazil and Europe. Americans should flock to it like gulls.Pub Date: July 1, 1993
ISBN: 0-06-250217-4
Page Count: 192
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1993
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
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