A haunting story that will remind many of Ondaatje’s The English Patient—and that merits the comparison.
Georgetown professor, NPR commentator, and first-novelist Callanan expertly fictionalizes one of WWII’s least-known stories.
The phenomenon of Japanese balloon bombs carrying both explosives and lethal germs to Alaska and the northwestern US is disclosed to, and monitored by, narrator Louis Belk, a young Army Air Corps sergeant trained as a bomb disposal specialist. In a dual narrative, we follow Louis’s experiences at his base in Anchorage and environs and also those a half-century later, when he spends his final days as a Catholic priest in the Alaskan wilderness at the deathbed of Yup’ik Eskimo Ronnie, a self-destructive alcoholic and professed shaman. Haunting motifs drawn from Yup’ik legend emerge in the moribund Ronnie’s tall tales, which loom in the reader’s awareness as parallels to the younger Louis’s guilt when a bomb he’s too inexperienced to defuse kills several comrades. Even more compromising emotions are churned up by his relationships with two other major characters: one is Lily, a beautiful half-breed prostitute and nominal “palm reader” who seems unusually attuned to the “spirit world” later evoked by the dying Ronnie; the other is her lover (and Louis’s superior officer), Captain Gurley, a hard-bitten, sardonic, wounded veteran who bullies and taunts his young subordinate into assisting his quest to persuade the Army that “the Japs . . . have reached North America.” Callanan’s complex plot tightens neatly when Gurley learns of Lily’s intimacy with Saburo, a Japanese fisherman (and perhaps spy) who’d disappeared into an uncharted forest—and leads Louis and Lily on an expedition that becomes a voyage of bitter discovery. In a climactic deathbed scene, Callanan brilliantly connects the fate of a boy sent across the ocean in a balloon with the shaman’s tale of a ceaselessly crying child—and with the last-revealed of Lily’s secrets.
A haunting story that will remind many of Ondaatje’s The English Patient—and that merits the comparison.Pub Date: Feb. 10, 2004
ISBN: 0-385-33694-2
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Delacorte
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2003
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
Coelho's placebo has racked up impressive sales in Brazil and Europe. Americans should flock to it like gulls.
Coelho is a Brazilian writer with four books to his credit. Following Diary of a Magus (1992—not reviewed) came this book, published in Brazil in 1988: it's an interdenominational, transcendental, inspirational fable—in other words, a bag of wind.
The story is about a youth empowered to follow his dream. Santiago is an Andalusian shepherd boy who learns through a dream of a treasure in the Egyptian pyramids. An old man, the king of Salem, the first of various spiritual guides, tells the boy that he has discovered his destiny: "to realize one's destiny is a person's only real obligation." So Santiago sells his sheep, sails to Tangier, is tricked out of his money, regains it through hard work, crosses the desert with a caravan, stops at an oasis long enough to fall in love, escapes from warring tribesmen by performing a miracle, reaches the pyramids, and eventually gets both the gold and the girl. Along the way he meets an Englishman who describes the Soul of the World; the desert woman Fatima, who teaches him the Language of the World; and an alchemist who says, "Listen to your heart" A message clings like ivy to every encounter; everyone, but everyone, has to put in their two cents' worth, from the crystal merchant to the camel driver ("concentrate always on the present, you'll be a happy man"). The absence of characterization and overall blandness suggest authorship by a committee of self-improvement pundits—a far cry from Saint- Exupery's The Little Prince: that flagship of the genre was a genuine charmer because it clearly derived from a quirky, individual sensibility.
Coelho's placebo has racked up impressive sales in Brazil and Europe. Americans should flock to it like gulls.Pub Date: July 1, 1993
ISBN: 0-06-250217-4
Page Count: 192
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1993
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
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