A lively and well-narrated tale that will appeal to Bruegel fans and may awaken newcomers to an interest in his work.
Pictures at an exhibition, sort of, as mathematician and SF writer Rucker (Spaceland, p. 778, etc.) tells the life of the great Flemish painter.
A true lowlander, born in Holland and raised in Antwerp, Bruegel traveled extensively throughout Europe in pursuit of training and work. Here, we follow his story from 1552 to 1569, in 16 chapters that organize themselves around 16 of the master’s best-known paintings. Thus, in “Mountain Landscape,” the painter and his faithful friend and colleague Martin De Vos have finished their apprenticeships and are traveling to Italy to seek their fortune as artists—though Bruegel has to spend the proceeds of his first sale to rescue Martin from a jealous husband. In Rome (“Tower of Babel”), Martin is at once enchanted and nauseated by the city’s beauty and venality. He has the good fortune to make friends with Abraham Ortelius, a fellow lowlander who helps him establish his reputation by introducing him to prominent Roman churchmen. After several years in Italy, Bruegel returns to Antwerp, where he spends the remainder of his life. Antwerp is quiet and backward compared to Rome, but even there Bruegel has to contend with politics at every stage of the game, currying favor with one prince or another to secure commissions and patronage—and taking his revenge as best he can when he’s thwarted. When Cardinal Granvelle, the Archbishop of Antwerp, discovers that Bruegel has made a drawing of Satan in his likeness, he nearly has the painter thrown into jail and has his servant (an American Indian named Williblad Cheroo) seduce Bruegel’s fiancée, Anja. Eventually, however, Bruegel is able to establish himself well enough that he can marry Anja, settle down to family life, and continue painting (“The Magpie on the Gallows”) right up to his death.
A lively and well-narrated tale that will appeal to Bruegel fans and may awaken newcomers to an interest in his work.Pub Date: Jan. 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-765-30403-1
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Forge
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2002
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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