A familiar love triangle reimagined in an absorbing tale.
Three characters haunted by loss search for consolation.
Evoking Francois Truffaut’s acclaimed movie Jules and Jim (and the semiautobiographical novel by Henry-Pierre Roché that inspired it), Dybek (When Captain Flint Was Still a Good Man, 2012) gently unfolds the story of two young men and the enigmatic woman who fascinates them and changes their lives. The story opens in Santa Monica in 1950, where Tom Combs, a Hollywood screenwriter, unexpectedly meets Paul Weyerhauser at a funeral. They have not seen each other since they first met in post–World War I Europe and became involved with a beautiful young American woman on an urgent quest. It was 1921, and Tom was assisting a priest in gathering bones for an ossuary, a memorial for soldiers lost in Verdun’s brutal conflict whose remains were strewn or buried throughout the countryside. He was charged, also, with following up pleas from the many family members who visited the priest, desperately hoping for information: “They would weep and talk—for hours sometimes—about the man they’d lost. As if all that talk might help us identify him, as if it might bring him back to life.” Among them is Sarah Hagen, whose husband, Lee, went missing in the spring of 1918. Something about her stirs Tom: He tells her he met Lee Hagen in Aix-les-Bains, that he seemed fine and happy. Sarah tries to believe the lie; certainly she believes Tom’s kindness, and the two begin an affair—brief, because Sarah goes on in her search. They meet again at a mental hospital in Italy, where an amnesiac patient may, or may not, be Lee Hagen and where they encounter Paul, an Austrian journalist also searching for a man: in his case, an American ambulance driver whose fate obsesses him. In delicate, evocative prose, Dybek captures the grim devastation of scarred battlefields, bombed villages, and fetid soil and conveys with sensitivity his characters’ unabated desire to see in the shellshocked soldier an answer to their deepest desire.
A familiar love triangle reimagined in an absorbing tale.Pub Date: June 12, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-5011-9176-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: March 19, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2018
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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