A fine tribute to a tireless and selfless champion of literary genius.
A fictional portrait of Sylvia Beach and her iconic Paris bookshop, Shakespeare and Company, from its founding in 1919 through 1936.
When, after a stint in the Red Cross, adventurous American Sylvia Beach opens Shakespeare and Company, first on 8 rue Dupuytren and later at its famous address, 12 rue de L’Odéon, it soon becomes a haven for Paris’ cadre of expatriate writers. Selling and renting English language books, the store is an ideal counterpart to La Maison des Amis des Livres, the French bookshop across the street, run by Sylvia’s friend and soon-to-be lover, Adrienne Monnier. Thanks to Sylvia’s fluency in French, and to Adrienne, the French and English literary worlds converge in the ambit of the two shops, known as “Odeonia.” Ernest Hemingway, Ezra Pound, F. Scott Fitzgerald, T.S. Eliot (and somewhat less eagerly, Gertrude Stein) are only a few of the notables that frequent Shakespeare and Company. As readers become inured to the heady atmosphere of cafe society and intellectual ferment on the Left Bank, the book’s midsection sags. Apart from a poignant crisis concerning Sylvia's mother, the bookseller's professional involvement with James Joyce poses the main, if not the only, conflict in Maher’s book. As Joyce strives to complete the groundbreaking Ulysses, Sylvia’s store is his refuge. Of all the passing writers, Joyce is the most meticulously portrayed: his egg-shaped head, his ashplant cane, his dog phobia, his failing vision (due to glaucoma). Sylvia helps Joyce sort out his domestic chaos and pays for his treatment by her own eye doctor. When excerpts from Ulysses appear in a New York magazine whose editors are then prosecuted for disseminating smut, other publishers run scared. Into this pusillanimous void steps Sylvia. But after gargantuan struggles to publish Ulysses under her own aegis, will Sylvia reap the rewards of her literary valor, or at least of her loyalty to Joyce? That is the question that propels this plot.
A fine tribute to a tireless and selfless champion of literary genius.Pub Date: Jan. 11, 2022
ISBN: 978-0-593102-18-3
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Berkley
Review Posted Online: Oct. 26, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2021
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
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
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