A leisurely paced novel from master stylist Skibell (The English Disease, 2003, etc.), who does a fine job of acquainting...
Dr. Jakob Sammelsohn, an oculist, falls in love with two different women at two different periods in 20th-century history—and along the way prominent figures, most notably Sigmund Freud, get caught up in his relationships.
At first Sammelsohn has the misfortune to become smitten with Emma Eckstein, one of Freud’s most famous patients. While love is always a complicated affair, the complications become more extraordinary when the object of your affection is herself in love with Freud and displaces this relationship onto you. Sammelsohn finds that Emma is more than he can handle when she begins to channel Ita, Sammelsohn’s young wife, who had died by suicide on their wedding night, when her husband was only 12. When Emma is committed to a hospital for symptoms of hysteria, Sammelsohn consults Freud to try to figure out how to deal with her strong desire to consummate the relationship—and, ironically, Freud is technically brilliant in his diagnosis but flustered by the reality of this woman. The narrative then shifts to a lengthy discussion of Dr. Ludovik Leyzer Zamenhof, creator of Esperanto and motivated by the universal language movement to seek peace and harmony. One of his followers is Fräulein Loë Bernfeld, with whom Sammelsohn falls desperately in love. Unlike his relationship with Emma, this relationship is consummated (in a scene that manages to be simultaneously both comic and erotic) and eventually leads to their marriage (destined, alas, not to last). Finally, the narrative shifts to the Warsaw Ghetto in the late 1930s, where Sammelsohn becomes involved in a bizarre scheme with an outré rabbi, but he emerges triumphant, eventually heading to the promised land of Palestine, thanks to the ghostly and angelic visitations of the late Ita.
A leisurely paced novel from master stylist Skibell (The English Disease, 2003, etc.), who does a fine job of acquainting the reader with 20th-century European intellectual culture.Pub Date: Sept. 7, 2010
ISBN: 978-1-56512-929-0
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Algonquin
Review Posted Online: June 2, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2010
BOOK REVIEW
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
Miller makes Homer pertinent to women facing 21st-century monsters.
A retelling of ancient Greek lore gives exhilarating voice to a witch.
“Monsters are a boon for gods. Imagine all the prayers.” So says Circe, a sly, petulant, and finally commanding voice that narrates the entirety of Miller’s dazzling second novel. The writer returns to Homer, the wellspring that led her to an Orange Prize for The Song of Achilles (2012). This time, she dips into The Odyssey for the legend of Circe, a nymph who turns Odysseus’ crew of men into pigs. The novel, with its distinctive feminist tang, starts with the sentence: “When I was born, the name for what I was did not exist.” Readers will relish following the puzzle of this unpromising daughter of the sun god Helios and his wife, Perse, who had negligible use for their child. It takes banishment to the island Aeaea for Circe to sense her calling as a sorceress: “I will not be like a bird bred in a cage, I thought, too dull to fly even when the door stands open. I stepped into those woods and my life began.” This lonely, scorned figure learns herbs and potions, surrounds herself with lions, and, in a heart-stopping chapter, outwits the monster Scylla to propel Daedalus and his boat to safety. She makes lovers of Hermes and then two mortal men. She midwifes the birth of the Minotaur on Crete and performs her own C-section. And as she grows in power, she muses that “not even Odysseus could talk his way past [her] witchcraft. He had talked his way past the witch instead.” Circe’s fascination with mortals becomes the book’s marrow and delivers its thrilling ending. All the while, the supernatural sits intriguingly alongside “the tonic of ordinary things.” A few passages coil toward melodrama, and one inelegant line after a rape seems jarringly modern, but the spell holds fast. Expect Miller’s readership to mushroom like one of Circe’s spells.
Miller makes Homer pertinent to women facing 21st-century monsters.Pub Date: April 10, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-316-55634-7
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Jan. 22, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2018
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