A sugar-coated history lesson for the cabana at the beach.
Having completed the Cole family trilogy (Matters of Choice, 1996, etc.), Gordon returns to the more familiar territory of Jewish history for his latest period novel.
The author plows relatively untouched ground here. His tale concerns the Sephardic Jews, who were expelled from their homelands on Iberian Peninsula in 1492 but have received short shrift ever since from history and literature, both of which have been dominated by the Ashkenazi Jews of Germany and Eastern Europe. Yiddish has more literary cachet than Ladino (the Sephardim's Judeo-Spanish language), and the sufferings of Jews at the hands of the Inquisition have received less attention than the pogroms in 19th-century Russia. So it's a welcome change to find a Jewish historical novel focused on the wanderings and bitter internal exile of a man separated from his family at the Expulsion and left behind in a now Jew-free Spain. The story of Yonah Toledano, the title character, begins with a mystery: who killed Yonah's older brother and stole the reliquary their father had crafted for the local priory? It soon becomes clear, however, that this will not be a Jewish version of Name of the Rose. Rather, Gordon is making a game but stolid effort to re-create the Spanish picaresque, substituting the Inquisition and anti-Jewish violence for the more mundane obstacles traditionally faced by the genre's peripatetic heroes. As is the norm for historical fiction of this sort, the hero is impossibly noble, and love is repeatedly thwarted but ultimately triumphs. Regrettably, the novel is utterly devoid of humor, and its plodding, dull, pseudo-archaic prose paralyzes the action. Rather than a bawdy romp in the picaresque style, this is a throwback to epic potboilers like Anthony Adverse and the other bestsellers of the 1930s: well-intentioned and too well-mannered.
A sugar-coated history lesson for the cabana at the beach.Pub Date: Aug. 1, 2000
ISBN: 0-312-26504-2
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Dunne/St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2000
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
Coelho's placebo has racked up impressive sales in Brazil and Europe. Americans should flock to it like gulls.
Coelho is a Brazilian writer with four books to his credit. Following Diary of a Magus (1992—not reviewed) came this book, published in Brazil in 1988: it's an interdenominational, transcendental, inspirational fable—in other words, a bag of wind.
The story is about a youth empowered to follow his dream. Santiago is an Andalusian shepherd boy who learns through a dream of a treasure in the Egyptian pyramids. An old man, the king of Salem, the first of various spiritual guides, tells the boy that he has discovered his destiny: "to realize one's destiny is a person's only real obligation." So Santiago sells his sheep, sails to Tangier, is tricked out of his money, regains it through hard work, crosses the desert with a caravan, stops at an oasis long enough to fall in love, escapes from warring tribesmen by performing a miracle, reaches the pyramids, and eventually gets both the gold and the girl. Along the way he meets an Englishman who describes the Soul of the World; the desert woman Fatima, who teaches him the Language of the World; and an alchemist who says, "Listen to your heart" A message clings like ivy to every encounter; everyone, but everyone, has to put in their two cents' worth, from the crystal merchant to the camel driver ("concentrate always on the present, you'll be a happy man"). The absence of characterization and overall blandness suggest authorship by a committee of self-improvement pundits—a far cry from Saint- Exupery's The Little Prince: that flagship of the genre was a genuine charmer because it clearly derived from a quirky, individual sensibility.
Coelho's placebo has racked up impressive sales in Brazil and Europe. Americans should flock to it like gulls.Pub Date: July 1, 1993
ISBN: 0-06-250217-4
Page Count: 192
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1993
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
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