One of the year’s most imaginative and challenging novels.
Acclaimed British author Norfolk follows his earlier critical successes Lemprière’s Dictionary (1992) and The Pope’s Rhinoceros (1996) with a complex symbolic novel whose several plots are set in classical Greece, Romania under Nazi occupation, and Paris in (it seems) the late 1960s.
The brilliant 100-page opening section is a vividly detailed account of a hunt in which a party of 60 renowned heroes (including one woman warrior: Atalanta) pursues the otherworldly wild boar inflicted on the kingdom of Kalydon by the aggrieved and vengeful goddess Artemis. It’s a fine piece of action writing, accompanied by numerous mock-scholarly footnotes throughout its first third—and also an absorbing analysis of the interrelations of Atalanta, her soulmate (and perhaps lover) Meleager (son of Kalydon’s King Oeneus), and their companion and antagonist Meilanion, a solitary “nighthunter” implicitly likened to the “dark” supernatural force they have together pledged to destroy. These three characters are recapitulated in those (whom we meet in Paris) of Solomon Memel, a Romanian refugee who was rescued by Greek resistance fighters and who later authored a famous allegorical poem entitled “The Boar Hunt”; the woman (Ruth) who directs a film inspired by “Sol’s” work; and Sol’s old friend Jacob, whose own annotations to a new edition of “The Boar Hunt” suggest that Sol has fabricated his own sufferings and exaggerated both the heroism of a woman guerrilla, “Thyella” (another avatar of Atalanta), and the epical malevolence of a German intelligence officer named Eberhardt, who may have been nothing more than an entry-level bureaucrat. The novel isn’t easy going, but Norfolk blends its disparate elements together with consummate skill, subtly dramatizing the intricacy and impenetrability of both legend and history (as Solomon puts it, “Our heroes never live the lives we require . . . . Their true acts take place in darkness and silence and their untellable stories rest with them in the cave”).
One of the year’s most imaginative and challenging novels.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-8021-1701-5
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Grove
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2001
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
Heartfelt, yes, but pretty routine.
Life lessons.
Angie Malone, the youngest of a big, warm Italian-American family, returns to her Pacific Northwest hometown to wrestle with various midlife disappointments: her divorce, Papa’s death, a downturn in business at the family restaurant, and, above all, her childlessness. After several miscarriages, she, a successful ad exec, and husband Conlan, a reporter, befriended a pregnant young girl and planned to adopt her baby—and then the birth mother changed her mind. Angie and Conlan drifted apart and soon found they just didn’t love each other anymore. Metaphorically speaking, “her need for a child had been a high tide, an overwhelming force that drowned them. A year ago, she could have kicked to the surface but not now.” Sadder but wiser, Angie goes to work in the struggling family restaurant, bickering with Mama over updating the menu and replacing the ancient waitress. Soon, Angie befriends another young girl, Lauren Ribido, who’s eager to learn and desperately needs a job. Lauren’s family lives on the wrong side of the tracks, and her mother is a promiscuous alcoholic, but Angie knows nothing of this sad story and welcomes Lauren into the DeSaria family circle. The girl listens in, wide-eyed, as the sisters argue and make wisecracks and—gee-whiz—are actually nice to each other. Nothing at all like her relationship with her sluttish mother, who throws Lauren out when boyfriend David, en route to Stanford, gets her pregnant. Will Lauren, who’s just been accepted to USC, let Angie adopt her baby? Well, a bit of a twist at the end keeps things from becoming too predictable.
Heartfelt, yes, but pretty routine.Pub Date: July 1, 2004
ISBN: 0-345-46750-7
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2004
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