Thoroughly captivating: the whole medieval panorama re-achieved by a modern, with all the atmosphere of the old.
The erudite and entertaining Ackroyd brings 1380s London to life all over again, with many a nod to The Canterbury Tales.
Chaucer set his people on the road, but there’s no actual pilgrimage in Ackroyd (The Plato Papers, 2000, etc.), whose characters pretty much stay in London. The Canterbury pilgrims do appear again, by name and vocation, though noting the differences between Chaucer’s characters and Ackroyd’s can be as much fun as crediting the similarities. Once again, they’re hardly a fault-free lot, though Ackroyd throws us a curve or two—his Physician is good through and through, his Pardoner hardly so bad a guy, and, unlike Chaucer’s saintly Clerk, Ackroyd’s is up for skullduggery indeed. What binds the tales together (aside from the much shared humanity in the close confines of a medieval city) is, not surprisingly, politics. Readers of Shakespeare’s Henry IV plays will be right at home: the tales here are told over exactly the same time as Henry Bolingbroke returns from France to reclaim the throne and depose (and then worse) Richard II. In fact, much of Ackroyd’s drama is generated through the machinations of a radically religious secret pro-Bolingbroke cell led by the truly monstrous William Exmewe (the Friar), whose belief as a so-called “predestined man” is that nothing one does for the good cause can be a sin—and readers will learn soon enough what Exmewe is capable of doing, as will Thomas Gunter (the Physician), Miles Vavasour (the Man of Law), and others. As the political crisis deepens, so does the threat to one of the cloistered nuns, Clarice, who, thought to be mad, emits prophetic utterances that displease the Prioress, stir up the townspeople, and most severely anger the king’s protectors. There will be arrests, interrogations, and worse before stability returns.
Thoroughly captivating: the whole medieval panorama re-achieved by a modern, with all the atmosphere of the old.Pub Date: Sept. 21, 2004
ISBN: 0-385-51121-3
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Nan A. Talese
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2004
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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