A sometimes-picaresque, sometimes-somber, always memorable portrait of life in all its glorious complexity, no matter how...
A modern classic of Hindi literature bows in English.
Parrots, metaphorical and literal, flit about this shaggy tale originally published in 1995 by the renowned Bhopal-born writer Ahtesham. “Zamir Ahmed Khan couldn’t understand how an entire species of bird could fall from grace for such a small act of ingratitude,” writes Ahtesham early on, noting the parrots’ failure to attach themselves to humans with doglike bonds of affection. Besides, Zamir notes, “to raise a parrot“ is proverbial for nursing a bad habit. Something is wrong with Zamir, but he doesn’t quite know what, and he never quite figures it out. The start of the story finds him calling on a gold-toothed Doctor Crocodile, who can find nothing wrong with him apart from a certain existential ennui. Not reassured, Zamir stumbles through life, encountering one parrot and one bad habit after another, while Ahtesham explores the lives of his fellow Muslims in ways that would sometimes seem to approach heresy: Here a woman returns from a hajj to Mecca glad to have survived the throng, saying scornfully, “Everyone goes through the motions, but no one has the brains to get the hidden meaning behind.” There Zamir, having learned to drink alcohol and commit indiscretions of the flesh, misunderstands the meaning behind a woman’s dark confession; “I didn’t tell you all this just to make you my secret keeper," she yells, throwing a volume of Freud at him as he makes good his escape. “Booze is as far as it goes!” he laments. “No gambling, no women. That’s the limit!” Alas, the limits are permeable, and if Zamir ends up no less discontented, he learns to appreciate simple things such as counting “flocks of birds as they flew from one end of the sky to the other,” even in the face of the disaster that put Bhopal on the map.
A sometimes-picaresque, sometimes-somber, always memorable portrait of life in all its glorious complexity, no matter how wearying.Pub Date: Aug. 15, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-8101-3758-5
Page Count: 308
Publisher: Northwestern Univ.
Review Posted Online: June 17, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 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
Doerr captures the sights and sounds of wartime and focuses, refreshingly, on the innate goodness of his major characters.
Doerr presents us with two intricate stories, both of which take place during World War II; late in the novel, inevitably, they intersect.
In August 1944, Marie-Laure LeBlanc is a blind 16-year-old living in the walled port city of Saint-Malo in Brittany and hoping to escape the effects of Allied bombing. D-Day took place two months earlier, and Cherbourg, Caen and Rennes have already been liberated. She’s taken refuge in this city with her great-uncle Etienne, at first a fairly frightening figure to her. Marie-Laure’s father was a locksmith and craftsman who made scale models of cities that Marie-Laure studied so she could travel around on her own. He also crafted clever and intricate boxes, within which treasures could be hidden. Parallel to the story of Marie-Laure we meet Werner and Jutta Pfennig, a brother and sister, both orphans who have been raised in the Children’s House outside Essen, in Germany. Through flashbacks we learn that Werner had been a curious and bright child who developed an obsession with radio transmitters and receivers, both in their infancies during this period. Eventually, Werner goes to a select technical school and then, at 18, into the Wehrmacht, where his technical aptitudes are recognized and he’s put on a team trying to track down illegal radio transmissions. Etienne and Marie-Laure are responsible for some of these transmissions, but Werner is intrigued since what she’s broadcasting is innocent—she shares her passion for Jules Verne by reading aloud 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea. A further subplot involves Marie-Laure’s father’s having hidden a valuable diamond, one being tracked down by Reinhold von Rumpel, a relentless German sergeant-major.
Doerr captures the sights and sounds of wartime and focuses, refreshingly, on the innate goodness of his major characters.Pub Date: May 6, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-4767-4658-6
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: March 5, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2014
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
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