The Ritz itself is the most well-rounded character here.
An American ex-flapper and a Parisian hotelier weather the German takeover of the Paris Ritz.
Benjamin’s new novel is a lively portrait of the opulent grand hotel which drew Picasso, Hemingway, Cole Porter—and Hermann Göring. In fact, more than a year before June 14, 1940, when invading Germans marched down the Champs Elysees, Göring and others were visiting Paris hotels to vet future Nazi headquarters. As the Occupation wears on, hotel director Claude Auzello and his American wife, Blanche, find it increasingly difficult to maintain their facade as the happily married team who run the Ritz. Their relationship was already challenged by Claude’s announcement that he had reserved Thursday nights for his mistress. In his insistence that infidelity is a French male privilege, Claude can be insufferable, and Blanche, over the years, has been known to desert him, temporarily. On one such escapade, she befriends Lily, a young radical who goes off to fight in the Spanish Civil War before returning to Paris to draw Blanche into the Resistance. Blanche is disappointed by Claude’s apparent willingness to toady to the Nazis who have become the Ritz’s most privileged guests (along with a certain high-profile collaboratrice, Coco Chanel). The narrative ricochets between the 1920s, when the couple met, and the novel’s present: the Occupation and its antecedents. Thanks to alternating points of view, readers are mostly privy to the secrets Blanche and Claude keep from one another. However, the delay in revealing the most critical secret of all, far from enhancing suspense, hamstrings the full exposition of Blanche as a character. The Auzellos were real people, and the facts of their lives are only a Google away. As Benjamin points out in her author’s note, the Auzellos’ story, though captivating, has not been often told, and the record is sparse. Benjamin hews closely to what is known, but the fully realized humanity of the Auzellos gets lost in the unknown—the realm where novelistic imagination is required.
The Ritz itself is the most well-rounded character here.Pub Date: May 21, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-399-18224-2
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Delacorte
Review Posted Online: March 2, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2019
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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