A relentlessly somber yet lyrical study of grief across decades.
A multigenerational saga about hard living in rural Iceland.
This hefty novel from the veteran Icelandic novelist opens with a case of lost memory: An amnesiac man wakes up in a churchyard and makes his way to the farmlands in the country’s more sparsely populated northern reaches. There he gathers stories about the residents’ often dour lives: infidelities, fatal car wrecks, early promise hitting the skids. Stefánsson’s novel encompasses a host of characters, but two of their stories occupy the bulk of it. In one, Guðríður, a 19th-century farmer’s wife, captures the imagination of a priest and journal editor with a philosophical essay about earthworms; the intellectual and romantic flirtation that ensues threatens to upend both of their lives. Another storyline turns on her great-great-grandson, Eiríkur, who’s half-successfully used his musical talent to manage a relationship with his father and find love, even if one longtime partner was married. Early on, the main drama involves Eiríkur’s arrest for shooting at a truck—a thin peg to hang a long novel on. And Stefánsson’s historical meanderings, including matters of faith, sex, and religion (Kierkegaard is repeatedly mentioned), can test a reader’s patience. Yet in evoking melancholy, Stefánsson (and translator Roughton) have ably elicited the feeling that “it can be so difficult to live that it’s visible from the moon.” And his descriptions of the northern Icelandic landscape are elegantly written and a perfect match for the vibe. “Your eyes shine so beautifully when you talk about your fjord…that the sadness disappears from them,” one of Eiríkur’s lovers tells him. “Keep going, don’t stop!” A series of song references, from Tom Waits and Leonard Cohen to various Scandinavian acts, supports the notion that the sadness has a kind of music to it; the novel is appended with “Death’s Playlist.”
A relentlessly somber yet lyrical study of grief across decades.Pub Date: March 5, 2024
ISBN: 9781771965811
Page Count: 456
Publisher: Biblioasis
Review Posted Online: Nov. 17, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2023
A dramatic, vividly detailed reconstruction of a little-known aspect of the Vietnam War.
A young woman’s experience as a nurse in Vietnam casts a deep shadow over her life.
When we learn that the farewell party in the opening scene is for Frances “Frankie” McGrath’s older brother—“a golden boy, a wild child who could make the hardest heart soften”—who is leaving to serve in Vietnam in 1966, we feel pretty certain that poor Finley McGrath is marked for death. Still, it’s a surprise when the fateful doorbell rings less than 20 pages later. His death inspires his sister to enlist as an Army nurse, and this turn of events is just the beginning of a roller coaster of a plot that’s impressive and engrossing if at times a bit formulaic. Hannah renders the experiences of the young women who served in Vietnam in all-encompassing detail. The first half of the book, set in gore-drenched hospital wards, mildewed dorm rooms, and boozy officers’ clubs, is an exciting read, tracking the transformation of virginal, uptight Frankie into a crack surgical nurse and woman of the world. Her tensely platonic romance with a married surgeon ends when his broken, unbreathing body is airlifted out by helicopter; she throws her pent-up passion into a wild affair with a soldier who happens to be her dead brother’s best friend. In the second part of the book, after the war, Frankie seems to experience every possible bad break. A drawback of the story is that none of the secondary characters in her life are fully three-dimensional: Her dismissive, chauvinistic father and tight-lipped, pill-popping mother, her fellow nurses, and her various love interests are more plot devices than people. You’ll wish you could have gone to Vegas and placed a bet on the ending—while it’s against all the odds, you’ll see it coming from a mile away.
A dramatic, vividly detailed reconstruction of a little-known aspect of the Vietnam War.Pub Date: Feb. 6, 2024
ISBN: 9781250178633
Page Count: 480
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Nov. 4, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2023
PERSPECTIVES
BOOK TO SCREEN
SEEN & HEARD
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
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