Brilliant work, from one of the finest new novelists at work today.
A most unusual portrait of the artist gradually takes shape in this Anglo-Indian author’s limpid second novel (after The Opium Clerk, 2003).
The story’s set in 16th-century Hindustan, where the gifted youth Bizhad, son of Mughal emperor Akbar’s favorite court painter (“the Kwaja”), grows up among the emperor’s inner circle. Bizhad, the namesake of a legendary artist renowned for his illustrations of classic Middle- and Near Eastern tales, is raised in a hothouse atmosphere by his father and beautiful young stepmother Zuleikha, kept away from all corrupting influences (i.e., other people), and forbidden to learn to read or write. Instead, he’s forced to concentrate his energies on an artistic bent that manifests itself in vivid, lurid miniatures depicting “haunting dervishes, lovers, poems of death and unrequited dreams.” The most compelling of such dreams is Bizhad’s unrequited love for his emperor, which he fantasizes in explicit erotic scenes showing himself and Akbar as lovers. A jealous rival reveals Bizhad’s secret, and he’s banished, thereafter condemned to years of wandering, poverty, and unfulfillment. But the death of a beloved friend stimulates new emotional and artistic growth, and a kind of miracle occurs. Out of Bizhad’s love for one man emerges a heartfelt identification with all human life, indeed the entire visible creation: a renewed passion of a very different kind, manifested in Bizhad’s much celebrated portrait of a Madonna and child, flowering in a life-affirming denial of the warning posed in the novel’s epigraph (that “thou who draw pictures will be punished on the day of resurrection”). This moving parable of the manifold sources of art bears some resemblance to Turkish author Orhan Pamuk’s My Name is Red. But it’s a richly satisfying original creation: a story that might have come out of a contemporary Arabian Nights.
Brilliant work, from one of the finest new novelists at work today.Pub Date: July 1, 2004
ISBN: 0-297-82926-2
Page Count: 247
Publisher: Weidenfeld & Nicolson/Trafalgar
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2004
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
Suspenseful, full of incident, and not obviously necessary.
Atwood goes back to Gilead.
The Handmaid’s Tale (1985), consistently regarded as a masterpiece of 20th-century literature, has gained new attention in recent years with the success of the Hulu series as well as fresh appreciation from readers who feel like this story has new relevance in America’s current political climate. Atwood herself has spoken about how news headlines have made her dystopian fiction seem eerily plausible, and it’s not difficult to imagine her wanting to revisit Gilead as the TV show has sped past where her narrative ended. Like the novel that preceded it, this sequel is presented as found documents—first-person accounts of life inside a misogynistic theocracy from three informants. There is Agnes Jemima, a girl who rejects the marriage her family arranges for her but still has faith in God and Gilead. There’s Daisy, who learns on her 16th birthday that her whole life has been a lie. And there's Aunt Lydia, the woman responsible for turning women into Handmaids. This approach gives readers insight into different aspects of life inside and outside Gilead, but it also leads to a book that sometimes feels overstuffed. The Handmaid’s Tale combined exquisite lyricism with a powerful sense of urgency, as if a thoughtful, perceptive woman was racing against time to give witness to her experience. That narrator hinted at more than she said; Atwood seemed to trust readers to fill in the gaps. This dynamic created an atmosphere of intimacy. However curious we might be about Gilead and the resistance operating outside that country, what we learn here is that what Atwood left unsaid in the first novel generated more horror and outrage than explicit detail can. And the more we get to know Agnes, Daisy, and Aunt Lydia, the less convincing they become. It’s hard, of course, to compete with a beloved classic, so maybe the best way to read this new book is to forget about The Handmaid’s Tale and enjoy it as an artful feminist thriller.
Suspenseful, full of incident, and not obviously necessary.Pub Date: Sept. 10, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-385-54378-1
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Nan A. Talese
Review Posted Online: Sept. 3, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2019
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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