By turns gritty and vague, Sveen’s stories seem undecided, wavering in both tone and intention.
A collection of stories inspired by the New Testament.
In Sveen’s first novel to be translated into English, New Testament figures—thieves, disciples, and the Son of God alike—walk, talk, breathe, and dream like living people. Sveen is a rising young star in his native Norway, and this collection of loosely linked stories requires a young star’s daring. Jesus is a real man here, making his way from village to village, Judas, Andrew, Simon Peter, and all the rest in tow, as the Roman “occupiers” flicker dangerously at their heels. The stories center on the broken and destitute: Anna, who is abused by man after man before she joins Jesus’ followers; Jacob, upon whom “evil had left its mark”—a debilitating stutter; Sarah, Jacob’s mother, who has died and narrates from beyond her life. There are others: a band of murderous thieves, a clique of Roman soldiers. Characters recur in multiple stories, with small changes in viewpoint, setting, and circumstance. For the most part, Sveen’s prose is clear; he doesn’t try to imitate the archaisms of an ancient language. As a matter of fact, he occasionally goes too far in the other direction, opting for phrases too modern for their setting here: Jacob, his father explains, “grew on me.” Someone else says, “pull yourself together.” Whether these idioms, or anachronisms, can be attributed to Sveen himself or to his translator, Puzey, isn’t clear. Either way, they speak to a larger flaw with Sveen’s book, and that is its overall intention. Sveen doesn’t seem particularly interested in the historical figures who appear in the New Testament, and though he cloaks his stories in a certain mysticism, he doesn’t seem entirely committed to their poetic possibilities, either. He’s stuck awkwardly in the middle, and his stories, therefore, ultimately fail to satisfy.
By turns gritty and vague, Sveen’s stories seem undecided, wavering in both tone and intention.Pub Date: Oct. 16, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-55597-820-4
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Graywolf
Review Posted Online: Aug. 20, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2018
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
Jonathan Livingston Kitty, it’s not.
A lonely postman learns that he’s about to die—and reflects on life as he bargains with a Hawaiian-shirt–wearing devil.
The 30-year-old first-person narrator in filmmaker/novelist Kawamura’s slim novel is, by his own admission, “boring…a monotone guy,” so unimaginative that, when he learns he has a brain tumor, the bucket list he writes down is dull enough that “even the cat looked disgusted with me.” Luckily—or maybe not—a friendly devil, dubbed Aloha, pops onto the scene, and he’s willing to make a deal: an extra day of life in exchange for being allowed to remove something pleasant from the world. The first thing excised is phones, which goes well enough. (The narrator is pleasantly surprised to find that “people seemed to have no problem finding something to fill up their free time.”) But deals with the devil do have a way of getting complicated. This leads to shallow musings (“Sometimes, when you rewatch a film after not having seen it for a long time, it makes a totally different impression on you than it did the first time you saw it. Of course, the movie hasn’t changed; it’s you who’s changed") written in prose so awkward, it’s possibly satire (“Tears dripped down onto the letter like warm, salty drops of rain”). Even the postman’s beloved cat, who gains the power of speech, ends up being prim and annoying. The narrator ponders feelings about a lost love, his late mother, and his estranged father in a way that some readers might find moving at times. But for many, whatever made this book a bestseller in Japan is going to be lost in translation.
Jonathan Livingston Kitty, it’s not.Pub Date: March 12, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-250-29405-0
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Flatiron Books
Review Posted Online: Feb. 16, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2019
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