Ghosts, angels, and demons hover in this quiet meditation on grief, love, and history.
A man’s death changes reality for his widow and daughter.
Originally published in Hungary in 1963, this newly translated novel by Prix Femina Etranger winner Szabó (1917-2007) (The Door, 2003, etc.) explores the clash of cultures between the country’s rural villages, mired in tradition, and its capital city, Budapest, uneasily sloughing off personal and collective memory. Szabó’s gentle, deliberate narrative begins in 1960 with the death of Vince Szócs, a judge whose career was truncated when he made a decision opposed by the rightist military regime; he was 66, already weakened by illness, when he was finally “rehabilitated.” He and his wife, Ettie, lived a simple, circumscribed, rustic life. Ettie “didn’t trust machines” or even “things as basic as electricity.” She preferred candles and toasting bread over a fire; “when the fire was lit she didn’t feel she was alone, not even when the house was empty.” The couple's daughter, Iza, takes charge the moment Vince dies, insisting that her mother come to Budapest, where Iza is a respected, well-paid physician. "What a delight it must be to move to Budapest,” neighbors thought, “to leave sad memories behind and to enjoy a happy old age in new circumstances.” But Ettie becomes disoriented and lonely in her daughter’s modern apartment, where a housekeeper cleans and cooks, where she has no friends and nothing to do, and where she cannot feel Vince’s spirit. As the story unfolds, Szabó reveals the complexities of the past, not only for Ettie, but also for Iza, whose coldness and self-discipline seem inexplicable to many who know her; Iza’s estranged husband; and his fiancee, a nurse who once deeply revered Iza but comes to pity her: "The poor woman believes that old people’s pasts are the enemy,” Lidia realizes. “She has failed to notice how those pasts are explanations and values, the key to the present.”
Ghosts, angels, and demons hover in this quiet meditation on grief, love, and history.Pub Date: Oct. 18, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-681-37034-7
Page Count: 336
Publisher: New York Review Books
Review Posted Online: Aug. 7, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2016
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
Jonathan Livingston Kitty, it’s not.
A lonely postman learns that he’s about to die—and reflects on life as he bargains with a Hawaiian-shirt–wearing devil.
The 30-year-old first-person narrator in filmmaker/novelist Kawamura’s slim novel is, by his own admission, “boring…a monotone guy,” so unimaginative that, when he learns he has a brain tumor, the bucket list he writes down is dull enough that “even the cat looked disgusted with me.” Luckily—or maybe not—a friendly devil, dubbed Aloha, pops onto the scene, and he’s willing to make a deal: an extra day of life in exchange for being allowed to remove something pleasant from the world. The first thing excised is phones, which goes well enough. (The narrator is pleasantly surprised to find that “people seemed to have no problem finding something to fill up their free time.”) But deals with the devil do have a way of getting complicated. This leads to shallow musings (“Sometimes, when you rewatch a film after not having seen it for a long time, it makes a totally different impression on you than it did the first time you saw it. Of course, the movie hasn’t changed; it’s you who’s changed") written in prose so awkward, it’s possibly satire (“Tears dripped down onto the letter like warm, salty drops of rain”). Even the postman’s beloved cat, who gains the power of speech, ends up being prim and annoying. The narrator ponders feelings about a lost love, his late mother, and his estranged father in a way that some readers might find moving at times. But for many, whatever made this book a bestseller in Japan is going to be lost in translation.
Jonathan Livingston Kitty, it’s not.Pub Date: March 12, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-250-29405-0
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Flatiron Books
Review Posted Online: Feb. 16, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2019
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