One can’t fault Kingsnorth for lack of ambition, though his story stumbles under its own linguistic weight. The reader will...
Frenchies is ycumen in—lhude sing Shazam!
The fens of eastern England, so memorably inhabited by Graham Swift in his 1984 novel Waterland, are no place for an outsider to wander into. Least of all if that outsider is a Norman, for then he’s likely to confront—well, if not Grendel, then a sturdy fellow named Buccmaster of Holland, who acts as if he owns the place. And so he does, for he lives on “three oxgangs of good land” on “an ealond in the fenns on all sides the wilde”—that is, about 60 acres on an island surrounded by wilderness and water, the kind of place where, with his peasant workers and his passel of sons, he can ignore the rest of the world. But he can’t, in the end, for with the arrival of William the Conqueror and company to the south and the Vikings to the north in that fated year 1066, Buccmaster is called on to do battle in the name of the Anglo-Saxon crown. Debut novelist and environmental journalist Kingsnorth opens with an ominous quotation from William of Malmesbury, to wit, “England is become the residence of foreigners and the property of strangers”—the sort of thing that an anti-EU type might dredge up today, perhaps, but that also nicely announces Buccmaster’s determination to keep not just the persons of the furriners out, but also their customs and manners, for “efry daeg they is cwellan us the cyng and the crist”—that is, every day the king and Christ are killing us. Kingsnorth’s use of an ever so slightly streamlined version of Old English to convey Buccmaster’s story, rich in ghosts and the old gods, is daring, but after a time it feels like a parlor trick: one wonders whether the story would have been better served with more straightforward, modern language. However, for the patient reader willing to puzzle and pause, the words are mostly clear enough, as when our man grumbles, “all i will hiere from thu is scit i saes” meaningfully, waxing most wroth.
One can’t fault Kingsnorth for lack of ambition, though his story stumbles under its own linguistic weight. The reader will judge whether it’s worth the heafodpanneteung.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-55597-717-7
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Graywolf
Review Posted Online: May 6, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
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
A deeply satisfying novel, both sensuously vivid and remarkably poignant.
Norwegian novelist Jacobsen folds a quietly powerful coming-of-age story into a rendition of daily life on one of Norway’s rural islands a hundred years ago in a novel that was shortlisted for the 2017 Man Booker International Prize.
Ingrid Barrøy, her father, Hans, mother, Maria, grandfather Martin, and slightly addled aunt Barbro are the owners and sole inhabitants of Barrøy Island, one of numerous small family-owned islands in an area of Norway barely touched by the outside world. The novel follows Ingrid from age 3 through a carefree early childhood of endless small chores, simple pleasures, and unquestioned familial love into her more ambivalent adolescence attending school off the island and becoming aware of the outside world, then finally into young womanhood when she must make difficult choices. Readers will share Ingrid’s adoration of her father, whose sense of responsibility conflicts with his romantic nature. He adores Maria, despite what he calls her “la-di-da” ways, and is devoted to Ingrid. Twice he finds work on the mainland for his sister, Barbro, but, afraid she’ll be unhappy, he brings her home both times. Rooted to the land where he farms and tied to the sea where he fishes, Hans struggles to maintain his family’s hardscrabble existence on an island where every repair is a struggle against the elements. But his efforts are Sisyphean. Life as a Barrøy on Barrøy remains precarious. Changes do occur in men’s and women’s roles, reflected in part by who gets a literal chair to sit on at meals, while world crises—a war, Sweden’s financial troubles—have unexpected impact. Yet the drama here occurs in small increments, season by season, following nature’s rhythm through deaths and births, moments of joy and deep sorrow. The translator’s decision to use roughly translated phrases in conversation—i.e., “Tha’s goen’ nohvar” for "You’re going nowhere")—slows the reading down at first but ends up drawing readers more deeply into the world of Barrøy and its prickly, intensely alive inhabitants.
A deeply satisfying novel, both sensuously vivid and remarkably poignant.Pub Date: April 7, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-77196-319-0
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Biblioasis
Review Posted Online: Jan. 12, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2020
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