A pleasure for fans of literary mystery—and of chess as well.
Furst meets Nabokov: an atmospheric blend of historical fact and detective-tale speculation against the backdrop of international chess.
First published in 2015 in Italy, this story is of a piece with Maurensig’s debut, The Lüneburg Variation (1993), in which Nazism meets the game of kings, with events reverberating long after the end of World War II. The story centers on Alexandre Alekhine, a Russian chess master whose antipathy toward Bolshevism led him to cast his lot with the Nazis. To what extent is a matter of much back and forth here, but Alekhine does not protest overmuch when Josef Goebbels, on playing a game with him, calls him a “friend of the Reich.” Ah, but then, Alekhine uses a defense in his game that owed to a Jewish predecessor, thinking it a fine irony that “right under the eyes of Reichsminister Goebbels, a Jew should poke his head out, grinning irreverently and making fun of them all.” Alekhine’s story unfolds through the eyes of a curious investigator, Venezuelan by birth, Italian by nationality, Portuguese by descent, a student of chess who considers Alekhine “a tutelary deity” but blanches at his awful anti-Semitism. More than 60 years after the fact, he travels to Portugal, where Alekhine had found himself marooned after the war, to look into the grandmaster’s death. Was he, as investigators held, the victim of accidentally choking on food? Passing himself off as a journalist, the protagonist finds other possibilities, including a carefully developed plotline that places Alekhine against the backdrop of the newly emerging Cold War and a vengeful Joseph Stalin. For Alekhine, even facing that fateful last supper of beef stroganoff, the game extends beyond the chessboard, a matter of cat and mouse to the end: “Deny, always deny, even in the face of the most glaring evidence.” Maurensig could just as easily have written this as a work of nonfiction save that his narrative frame allows him to play freely with alternative theories.
A pleasure for fans of literary mystery—and of chess as well.Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-374-27380-4
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: Oct. 10, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2017
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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