Bold, original, and uneven.
The author of Bitter in the Mouth (2010) and The Book of Salt (2003) imagines the extraordinary lives of three women who loved an extraordinary man.
Lafcadio Hearn is best remembered offering Anglophone readers some of their first glimpses of Japan after that country opened to Western travelers. But his life began in 1850 on an island that would later become part of Greece, and he had a sojourn in the United States before he journeyed to Japan. Hearn is the central figure in Truong’s latest novel, but he is present as an absence. To the extent that this is the story of his life, it is that story as witnessed by his mother and his two wives. Rosa, his mother, is sharing her tale after her son has been taken in by his father’s Anglo Irish family. It is her hope that he will one day want to know about her. Alethea is his first wife. Formerly enslaved, she meets Hearn while cooking in a Cincinnati boardinghouse where he is staying. Truong creates distinct, engaging voices for these women. Rosa’s story is permeated with a sense of loss, but she also shares some rather tart wisdom with the young woman who is writing down her words. Alethea’s tone is matter-of-fact and occasionally confrontational. The racial barriers that made her marriage to Hearn a scandal also circumscribe the dynamic between her and the journalist asking for information about her husband. Setsu is the daughter of a samurai, Hearn’s second wife, and the mother of his children. Like Alethea, she is telling her story after Hearn’s death. Truong gives Setsu her own style, too, one that is spare, elliptical, and personal without being obviously intimate. This creates a distance between novel and reader that is widened by the fact that Setsu is speaking not to a scribe unfamiliar with her story but rather to her dead husband. In order to impart important details to the reader, Truong has to force Setsu to tell Hearn things he already knows. Some readers will be unperturbed. Others may find their willingness to suspend disbelief tested.
Bold, original, and uneven.Pub Date: Sept. 3, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-7352-2101-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: June 16, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2019
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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