A standard cast-of-characters tale, formulaic but decently done.
First fiction from a bestselling Middle East historian: a story, based in part on his father’s WWII reminiscences, of an army reunion commemorating the 50th anniversary of the Battle of the Bulge.
Oren (Six Days of War, 2002, etc.) takes us along with the remnants of the 133rd Infantry Battalion, who meet up in the tiny Belgian village of St.-Vith to catch up on what they’ve been doing since the Ardennes offensive of 1944. Like most army units, the 133rd is a mixed bag. There’s Colonel Rifesnider, a blueblood preppie who served as headmaster at several tony prep schools after the war until his fondness for young boys became too blatant. Major Walker, who ran most of the daily operations of the unit, was a wild Texas rancher who became an even wilder Texas oilman after he inherited his Daddy’s spread and struck it rich in the 1950s. Lieutenant Hill was a no-nonsense officer who settled quietly into life as a bank manager in Iowa, while Corporal Perlmutter, the company clerk, went on to become a respected historian. Most have put the war far behind them, but for some it is the wound that never heals. Francis Spagnola, racked with guilt over his cowardice under fire, still attends weekly sessions of a veterans support group, while the stolid Wisconsin stonecutter Pieter Martinson continues to dream of the girl he forsook 50 years ago out of shame over his battle-fatigue discharge. More than a few ghosts are put to rest by story’s end—and several new skeletons exhumed from their closets. What kind of scheme, for example, was Rifesnider running with Perlmutter when the two stayed on after the hostilities to locate the corpses of American MIAs—corpses that were never officially found, though people claimed to have seen them? And what exactly has the town butcher (who served as a local errand boy for Rifesnider) got hidden in his cellar?
A standard cast-of-characters tale, formulaic but decently done.Pub Date: May 1, 2003
ISBN: 1-931561-26-5
Page Count: 356
Publisher: MacAdam/Cage
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2003
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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