Initially, and fitfully engrossing, but the book turns into a harangue that just doesn’t know when to stop.
The brutality and carnage that comprise the legacy of Francisco Franco’s “Republican” regime reshape and afflict several lives in Catalan playwright and screenwriter Baulenas’s accusatory novel.
The present actions occur in 1949, when protagonist and narrator Genís Aleu, a sergeant in the Spanish Foreign Legion, returns to Barcelona following an eight-year exile—resolved to fulfill a promise made to his father Joan, who died in a prisoner of war camp. The past that burdens Genís is revealed in juxtaposed chapters that depict his family’s wartime experiences: how Joan, a commercial sign painter, was drawn into the chaos of Spain’s Civil War; the sufferings of his wife and son (then called “Niso”), when the latter was sent to a Dickensian Charity Home; and the burden accepted by Niso when his father, released and sent home to die, charged the boy with finding and reburying the body of Joan’s comrade Bartomeu Camús, who had been executed for loudly protesting the Franco regime’s many crimes against humanity. Baulenas gets good suspenseful mileage out of gradual discoveries made by the adult Genís (and hence the reader). The novel is especially compelling in scenes set at the charity home, and it’s also good at depicting the ironic circumstances of Genís’s return: He is assigned to lecture and recruit future foreign legionnaires at the combat-training facility built on the site of the former POW camp. There are vivid characterizations of Niso’s unflappable friend and mentor at the home, “No-Sister-Salvador”; of compassionate Sister Paula, who arouses both Niso’s social conscience and his embryonic libido; and of Genís’s Barcelona contact, flinty Major Cedazo, who will play a crucial role in the novel’s bitter denouement. But Baulenas repeatedly overstates his case, exposing his plot’s essential thinness while indulging in hyperbolic (albeit just, and perfectly understandable) excoriations of Franco and his murderous minions.
Initially, and fitfully engrossing, but the book turns into a harangue that just doesn’t know when to stop.Pub Date: July 1, 2008
ISBN: 978-0-15-101255-8
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Harcourt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2008
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
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.
Four men who meet as college roommates move to New York and spend the next three decades gaining renown in their professions—as an architect, painter, actor and lawyer—and struggling with demons in their intertwined personal lives.
Yanagihara (The People in the Trees, 2013) takes the still-bold leap of writing about characters who don’t share her background; in addition to being male, JB is African-American, Malcolm has a black father and white mother, Willem is white, and “Jude’s race was undetermined”—deserted at birth, he was raised in a monastery and had an unspeakably traumatic childhood that’s revealed slowly over the course of the book. Two of them are gay, one straight and one bisexual. There isn’t a single significant female character, and for a long novel, there isn’t much plot. There aren’t even many markers of what’s happening in the outside world; Jude moves to a loft in SoHo as a young man, but we don’t see the neighborhood change from gritty artists’ enclave to glitzy tourist destination. What we get instead is an intensely interior look at the friends’ psyches and relationships, and it’s utterly enthralling. The four men think about work and creativity and success and failure; they cook for each other, compete with each other and jostle for each other’s affection. JB bases his entire artistic career on painting portraits of his friends, while Malcolm takes care of them by designing their apartments and houses. When Jude, as an adult, is adopted by his favorite Harvard law professor, his friends join him for Thanksgiving in Cambridge every year. And when Willem becomes a movie star, they all bask in his glow. Eventually, the tone darkens and the story narrows to focus on Jude as the pain of his past cuts deep into his carefully constructed life.
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.Pub Date: March 10, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-385-53925-8
Page Count: 720
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Dec. 21, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2015
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