A sympathetic but sketchy portrait of a legend.
Coelho’s (Adultery, 2014, etc.) novel about Mata Hari, the notorious and (in all likelihood) falsely accused World War I spy, hews closely to the facts.
A prologue reveals what we already know from history: Mata Hari was executed by firing squad in Paris on Oct. 15, 1917. The rest of the book consists of Mata’s fictional letter to her defense attorney, M. Clunet, written while on death row in the Saint-Lazare prison, and a similarly speculative letter of regret by Clunet. Mata cynically and philosophically details her bare-bones autobiography: she was born Margaretha Zelle to a bourgeois family in Holland. Raped by a school principal at 16, she is desperate to escape school and Holland: this she achieves by marrying a Dutch army captain and moving to Indonesia. The officer beats and sexually abuses her for years, until another military wife’s suicide and a performance by Javanese dancers inspire Margaretha to rebel and return to Europe. Making her way to Paris, she introduces herself as Mata Hari to an impresario, Monsieur Guimet, who invites her to premiere her act—a spectacle that combines Java-esque dance moves and strip tease—at his museum. Her performances, a mélange of titillation and sophistication, quickly catapult her to fame in the priciest nightclubs; soon she's the toast of Paris. With this go riches accumulated as the mistress of wealthy industrialists and bankers. Living only for pleasure, Mata is oblivious to the approaching hostilities of the Great War, so when she is invited to perform in Berlin, she goes without hesitation only to find that she is being recruited as a spy for the kaiser. What follows is a grim comedy of errors as Mata, after traveling back to Paris through a war zone, offers her services to France as a double agent. Unfortunately, her French handler has a hidden agenda. The absurdity of the charges against Mata Hari comes through clearly, but even as she tells her own story we never get a sense of her humanity, only her various personas and masks.
A sympathetic but sketchy portrait of a legend.Pub Date: Nov. 15, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-5247-3206-6
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Oct. 5, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2016
Absolutely enthralling. Read it.
A young Irish couple gets together, splits up, gets together, splits up—sorry, can't tell you how it ends!
Irish writer Rooney has made a trans-Atlantic splash since publishing her first novel, Conversations With Friends, in 2017. Her second has already won the Costa Novel Award, among other honors, since it was published in Ireland and Britain last year. In outline it's a simple story, but Rooney tells it with bravura intelligence, wit, and delicacy. Connell Waldron and Marianne Sheridan are classmates in the small Irish town of Carricklea, where his mother works for her family as a cleaner. It's 2011, after the financial crisis, which hovers around the edges of the book like a ghost. Connell is popular in school, good at soccer, and nice; Marianne is strange and friendless. They're the smartest kids in their class, and they forge an intimacy when Connell picks his mother up from Marianne's house. Soon they're having sex, but Connell doesn't want anyone to know and Marianne doesn't mind; either she really doesn't care, or it's all she thinks she deserves. Or both. Though one time when she's forced into a social situation with some of their classmates, she briefly fantasizes about what would happen if she revealed their connection: "How much terrifying and bewildering status would accrue to her in this one moment, how destabilising it would be, how destructive." When they both move to Dublin for Trinity College, their positions are swapped: Marianne now seems electric and in-demand while Connell feels adrift in this unfamiliar environment. Rooney's genius lies in her ability to track her characters' subtle shifts in power, both within themselves and in relation to each other, and the ways they do and don't know each other; they both feel most like themselves when they're together, but they still have disastrous failures of communication. "Sorry about last night," Marianne says to Connell in February 2012. Then Rooney elaborates: "She tries to pronounce this in a way that communicates several things: apology, painful embarrassment, some additional pained embarrassment that serves to ironise and dilute the painful kind, a sense that she knows she will be forgiven or is already, a desire not to 'make a big deal.' " Then: "Forget about it, he says." Rooney precisely articulates everything that's going on below the surface; there's humor and insight here as well as the pleasure of getting to know two prickly, complicated people as they try to figure out who they are and who they want to become.
Absolutely enthralling. Read it.Pub Date: April 16, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-984-82217-8
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Hogarth
Review Posted Online: Feb. 17, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2019
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"This soil," concludes the young narrator of this quiet chronicle of garrotted innocence, "is bad for all kinds of flowers. Certain seeds it will not nurture, certain fruit it will not bear." And among the exclusions of white rural Ohio, echoed by black respectability, is ugly, black, loveless, twelve-year-old Pecola. But in a world where blue-eyed gifts are clucked over and admired, and the Pecolas are simply not seen, there is always the possibility of the dream and wish—for blue eyes. Born of a mother who adjusted her life to the clarity and serenity of white households and "acquired virtues that were easy to maintain" and a father, Cholly, stunted by early rejections and humiliations, Pecola just might have been loved—for in raping his daughter Cholly did at least touch her. But "Love is never better than the lover," and with the death of her baby, the child herself, accepting absolutely the gift of blue eyes from a faith healer (whose perverse interest in little girls does not preclude understanding), inches over into madness. A skillful understated tribute to the fall of a sparrow for whose small tragedy there was no watching eye.
Pub Date: Oct. 29, 1970
ISBN: 0375411550
Page Count: -
Publisher: Holt Rinehart & Winston
Review Posted Online: Sept. 30, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 1970
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