A nimble writer who merits wider readership in English—and several more novels await translation.
A postmodern work of fiction made up of neatly assembled and interpreted facts, the first of Argentine writer Sagasti's books to be translated into English.
It makes good sense that by day, Sagasti works as a museum curator, for this is a diligently collected series of oddments that help make sense of how the world works—and, as Sagasti writes, that it works at all is a marvel, since “for the machine to keep running, it’s better not to mention certain things.” Those certain things might include matters of family dysfunction or historical inconveniences; whatever the case, Sagasti enjoys turning them up and looking them over, counseling that in a world full of people as cold as the distant heavens, “we should seek out only the fireflies,” never mind that they die just like everything else. Sagasti keeps the theme of his title alive and at work throughout this brief book, which turns into a lively meditation on how things connect and cohere of the sort that Guy Davenport would have approved. One firefly is the German artist Joseph Beuys, shot down as a Luftwaffe pilot over Russia and briefly held by a Tatar shaman who allays his fears by pointing to the flickering stars—and then, it seems, implants those stars in Beuys’ head, for “shamans travel into the skies in search of the sick person’s soul in order to return it to their body.” If shamans can do it, so can the time-traveling Billy Pilgrim, another prisoner of war, of Kurt Vonnegut’s novel Slaughterhouse-Five; and the Tatars may have taken an idea or two from Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, another flyer whose novel The Little Prince was translated into their language. In the manner of a well-functioning ecosystem, everything in Sagasti’s book connects to everything else, and it’s a subtle marvel—especially the surprise ending.
A nimble writer who merits wider readership in English—and several more novels await translation.Pub Date: Feb. 4, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-9997227-4-6
Page Count: 85
Publisher: Charco Press
Review Posted Online: Nov. 10, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2019
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
BOOK TO SCREEN
A modern day fable, with modern implications in a deceiving simplicity, by the author of Dickens. Dali and Others (Reynal & Hitchcock, p. 138), whose critical brilliance is well adapted to this type of satire. This tells of the revolt on a farm, against humans, when the pigs take over the intellectual superiority, training the horses, cows, sheep, etc., into acknowledging their greatness. The first hints come with the reading out of a pig who instigated the building of a windmill, so that the electric power would be theirs, the idea taken over by Napoleon who becomes topman with no maybes about it. Napoleon trains the young puppies to be his guards, dickers with humans, gradually instigates a reign of terror, and breaks the final commandment against any animal walking on two legs. The old faithful followers find themselves no better off for food and work than they were when man ruled them, learn their final disgrace when they see Napoleon and Squealer carousing with their enemies... A basic statement of the evils of dictatorship in that it not only corrupts the leaders, but deadens the intelligence and awareness of those led so that tyranny is inevitable. Mr. Orwell's animals exist in their own right, with a narrative as individual as it is apt in political parody.
Pub Date: Aug. 26, 1946
ISBN: 0452277507
Page Count: 114
Publisher: Harcourt, Brace
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1946
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