Gorgeous and heartbreaking.
A brilliant meditation on time, mortality, and the limits of memory.
Ullmann is a journalist, a literary critic, and the author of several novels—most recently The Cold Song (2014). She is also the daughter of the actor Liv Ullmann and the legendary Swedish director Ingmar Bergman. This memoir in the shape of a novel—or novel based on memoir—began as a series of conversations the writer had with her father shortly before he died. While much of the book is devoted to her early life—when her father was fit and commanding—a sense of loss permeates the narrative. Ullmann recounts the precise instant when it became clear that the man she knew was gone: The studiously punctual Bergman is late to meet her for a movie showing, a daily ritual that has been part of his life for decades. Ullmann is shocked in the moment, but it’s only in retrospect that she recognizes it for what it is. The recordings Ullmann made—which appear in transcript form throughout the book—function more as talismans than as documentary evidence of the man her father was. The sound quality is poor. The conversation is halting, and there are gaps in Bergman’s memory. What Ullmann wants to capture is already in the process of disappearing. So, she’s left with her own memories. Certainly, her memories are singular. Bergman had multiple wives and mistresses and many, many children and grandchildren, all of whom come and go on the isolated island where the director has made his home. Ullmann’s situation is exceptional, but the emotional experiences she describes are poignant and accessible. When she recounts scenes from her childhood, she sometimes speaks in the first person and she sometimes calls herself “the girl,” underscoring the sense in which past selves are constructions we create in the present. And, of course, her memories of her father as a younger man may be vivid, but they are no more reliable than those garbled digital recordings of her father in his decline. Ullmann’s prose is elegant (her translator deserves some credit for this), sharp, and occasionally funny. But the mood of this work as a whole is elegiac. “Can I,” she asks, “mourn people who are still alive?”
Gorgeous and heartbreaking.Pub Date: Jan. 15, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-393-60994-3
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: Nov. 25, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 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
An illuminating read for anyone interested in the inner workings of the Catholic Church; for prelate-fiction superfans, it...
Harris, creator of grand, symphonic thrillers from Fatherland (1992) to An Officer and a Spy (2014), scores with a chamber piece of a novel set in the Vatican in the days after a fictional pope dies.
Fictional, yes, but the nameless pontiff has a lot in common with our own Francis: he’s famously humble, shunning the lavish Apostolic Palace for a small apartment, and he is committed to leading a church that engages with the world and its problems. In the aftermath of his sudden death, rumors circulate about the pope’s intention to fire certain cardinals. At the center of the action is Cardinal Lomeli, Dean of the College of Cardinals, whose job it is to manage the conclave that will elect a new pope. He believes it is also his duty to uncover what the pope knew before he died because some of the cardinals in question are in the running to succeed him. “In the running” is an apt phrase because, as described by Harris, the papal conclave is the ultimate political backroom—albeit a room, the Sistine Chapel, covered with Michelangelo frescoes. Vying for the papal crown are an African cardinal whom many want to see as the first black pope, a press-savvy Canadian, an Italian arch-conservative (think Cardinal Scalia), and an Italian liberal who wants to continue the late pope’s campaign to modernize the church. The novel glories in the ancient rituals that constitute the election process while still grounding that process in the real world: the Sistine Chapel is fitted with jamming devices to thwart electronic eavesdropping, and the pressure to act quickly is increased because “rumours that the pope is dead are already trending on social media.”
An illuminating read for anyone interested in the inner workings of the Catholic Church; for prelate-fiction superfans, it is pure temptation.Pub Date: Nov. 22, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-451-49344-6
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Sept. 6, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2016
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