A historical novel that’s more interested in famous names than emotional resonance.
In Myers’ (Paris 1935: Destiny’s Crossroads, 2011, etc.) latest novel, a veteran literary agent makes his way through the literary scene of interwar Paris.
Few places evoke nostalgia like the City of Light in the 1920s, and Myers doesn’t skimp on the literary and historical details in his latest novel: His protagonist, Bill Lawrence, an American war veteran turned literary agent, encounters a bevy of famous writers and artists, although Ernest Hemingway, who provides the novel with its guiding spirit, never makes an appearance. When Kurt Eckhart, an old friend of Bill’s from the war, gets in touch about a manuscript he’s writing about his postwar life in Berlin, Bill is immediately intrigued. He and his American expatriate friend, Kate Lundberg, help Kurt edit his book; Bill believes it will compete with the novel Hemingway is writing—which will eventually become A Farewell to Arms. Kurt’s novel-within-the-novel has essentially the same plot as that Hemingway masterpiece, and although the book emphasizes the superiority of Kurt’s vision, it inevitably suffers from the constant allusions to Hemingway’s oeuvre—it feels like a pale imitation of those classic works. Myers’ book, meanwhile, bears more than a passing resemblance to The Sun Also Rises. The author unfortunately assumes that readers will be ignorant of the history of the period; every historical figure is introduced with a short biography, and the last third of the book rejects dramatic action in favor of long scenes featuring characters rehashing well-known historical events. Readers with no knowledge of this material may find this aspect educational, but it may be frustrating for the better informed. Myers’ depiction of women is particularly disturbing; he seems fixated on lesbian sexuality, and yet his women seem inclined to fall for men. At one point, Djuna Barnes, the bisexual author of the 1936 novel Nightwood and a central character in this book, recovers from her difficult break with a female lover by becoming involved with Kurt. In a novel so concerned with the historical record, some readers may find this invention alarming.
A historical novel that’s more interested in famous names than emotional resonance.Pub Date: Nov. 28, 2012
ISBN: 978-1481100465
Page Count: 246
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: May 2, 2013
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
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
Inspired by disclosures of a real-life Florida reform school’s long-standing corruption and abusive practices, Whitehead’s...
The acclaimed author of The Underground Railroad (2016) follows up with a leaner, meaner saga of Deep South captivity set in the mid-20th century and fraught with horrors more chilling for being based on true-life atrocities.
Elwood Curtis is a law-abiding, teenage paragon of rectitude, an avid reader of encyclopedias and after-school worker diligently overcoming hardships that come from being abandoned by his parents and growing up black and poor in segregated Tallahassee, Florida. It’s the early 1960s, and Elwood can feel changes coming every time he listens to an LP of his hero Martin Luther King Jr. sermonizing about breaking down racial barriers. But while hitchhiking to his first day of classes at a nearby black college, Elwood accepts a ride in what turns out to be a stolen car and is sentenced to the Nickel Academy, a juvenile reformatory that looks somewhat like the campus he’d almost attended but turns out to be a monstrously racist institution whose students, white and black alike, are brutally beaten, sexually abused, and used by the school’s two-faced officials to steal food and supplies. At first, Elwood thinks he can work his way past the arbitrary punishments and sadistic treatment (“I am stuck here, but I’ll make the best of it…and I’ll make it brief”). He befriends another black inmate, a street-wise kid he knows only as Turner, who has a different take on withstanding Nickel: “The key to in here is the same as surviving out there—you got to see how people act, and then you got to figure out how to get around them like an obstacle course.” And if you defy them, Turner warns, you’ll get taken “out back” and are never seen or heard from again. Both Elwood’s idealism and Turner’s cynicism entwine into an alliance that compels drastic action—and a shared destiny. There's something a tad more melodramatic in this book's conception (and resolution) than one expects from Whitehead, giving it a drugstore-paperback glossiness that enhances its blunt-edged impact.
Inspired by disclosures of a real-life Florida reform school’s long-standing corruption and abusive practices, Whitehead’s novel displays its author’s facility with violent imagery and his skill at weaving narrative strands into an ingenious if disquieting whole.Pub Date: July 16, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-385-53707-0
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Jan. 20, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2019
PERSPECTIVES
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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