A small gem for admirers of Mishima, Oe, and other midcentury modernists.
Final work by Tanizaki (Red Roofs & Other Stories, 2016, etc.), one of the greatest 20th-century Japanese novelists.
Chikura Raikichi isn’t a voyeur, not exactly. A celebrated writer, he’s more of an anthropologist behind his own doors, and now, observing the ways of his maids and the night-crawling young men of the district, he’s in a nostalgic mood, as a doyenne in Alabama might have been in the 1960s. “We no longer call the household help ‘maids,’ "he sighs, “and we can’t simply address them by their given names, as we did in the old days.” As the narrator notes, Raikichi does not approve of such innovations as calling a maid “Sister,” since it’s a term used for the sake waitresses at the beef shops of old, too. Tanizaki, who died in 1965, focuses closely on all the changes that came over Japan after the war, when country girls stopped hiring on in service to fine households, harder work in all than finding a job in a factory or secretarial pool—and certainly stopped hiring on for life. “Today’s girls stay for six months or a year,” the narrator laments, “thinking it good training for married life, then they hear from home about a marriage prospect, and they’re gone.” In between moments of ponderous reflection, Raikichi delights in the simple ways of some of his servants, such as one who spoke in amusing dialect (“the jabbering of southern barbarians”) and another who, witnessing dogs copulating, was thrown by the subject until having it explained to her, whereupon “whenever she heard that two dogs were going at it, she would go to watch.” There’s a faintly musty exoticism to the whole enterprise, but Tanizaki, as always, is a keen student of human ways and admirable for his attention to detail; the slender book is reminiscent of the best of Turgenev, if without the Russian writer’s arch humor.
A small gem for admirers of Mishima, Oe, and other midcentury modernists.Pub Date: April 25, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-8112-2492-5
Page Count: 190
Publisher: New Directions
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2017
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
An illuminating read for anyone interested in the inner workings of the Catholic Church; for prelate-fiction superfans, it...
Harris, creator of grand, symphonic thrillers from Fatherland (1992) to An Officer and a Spy (2014), scores with a chamber piece of a novel set in the Vatican in the days after a fictional pope dies.
Fictional, yes, but the nameless pontiff has a lot in common with our own Francis: he’s famously humble, shunning the lavish Apostolic Palace for a small apartment, and he is committed to leading a church that engages with the world and its problems. In the aftermath of his sudden death, rumors circulate about the pope’s intention to fire certain cardinals. At the center of the action is Cardinal Lomeli, Dean of the College of Cardinals, whose job it is to manage the conclave that will elect a new pope. He believes it is also his duty to uncover what the pope knew before he died because some of the cardinals in question are in the running to succeed him. “In the running” is an apt phrase because, as described by Harris, the papal conclave is the ultimate political backroom—albeit a room, the Sistine Chapel, covered with Michelangelo frescoes. Vying for the papal crown are an African cardinal whom many want to see as the first black pope, a press-savvy Canadian, an Italian arch-conservative (think Cardinal Scalia), and an Italian liberal who wants to continue the late pope’s campaign to modernize the church. The novel glories in the ancient rituals that constitute the election process while still grounding that process in the real world: the Sistine Chapel is fitted with jamming devices to thwart electronic eavesdropping, and the pressure to act quickly is increased because “rumours that the pope is dead are already trending on social media.”
An illuminating read for anyone interested in the inner workings of the Catholic Church; for prelate-fiction superfans, it is pure temptation.Pub Date: Nov. 22, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-451-49344-6
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Sept. 6, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2016
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