A real-life modernist relationship is revived with commitment if not quite enough conviction.
An intense clandestine love affair between two Frenchwomen during the first half of the 20th century spans art and literature, war and imprisonment, madness and devotion.
In his 10th novel, British writer Thomson (Katherine Carlyle, 2015, etc.) traces the intertwined biographies of two historical challengers of convention: Suzanne Malherbe, aka Marcel Moore, and Lucie Schwob, aka Claude Cahun. Their teenage attraction, which blossomed into adult love, was shielded by the fact that Suzanne’s widowed mother and Lucie’s divorced father fell in love and married, transforming the women into stepsisters. The daughter of a schizophrenic mother, Claude is impulsive and volatile, anorexic, sometimes suicidal, a cross-dresser who explores creativity in various forms, including acting and writing. Marcel, an illustrator and photographer, is the more grounded, less wayward of the two. After growing up in Nantes, the two women move to Paris in 1920, where they mingle with Dadaists, surrealists, and the avant-garde. Dalí makes an appearance, as do Hemingway, André Breton, and others. A sequence of holidays spent in the Channel Isles leads to a decision to move there in 1937, but the Nazi occupation in 1940 destroys the women’s idyllic life. For the next four years, Claude and Marcel perform their own acts of resistance, printing and distributing subversive leaflets, but their semi-creative actions lead to dark consequences when the Germans arrest, interrogate, and imprison them for months. It’s the war experiences of Claude and Marcel and their circle that strike the most memorable, penetrating note in this loosely spun account of bohemian choices. Thomson approaches the women’s story with poetic empathy, yet the result can seem scant and oddly paced, swooping in for consequential moments, then jumping ahead without connection. The effect is both beguiling and detached.
A real-life modernist relationship is revived with commitment if not quite enough conviction.Pub Date: June 5, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-59051-913-4
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Other Press
Review Posted Online: March 19, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2018
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
Miller makes Homer pertinent to women facing 21st-century monsters.
A retelling of ancient Greek lore gives exhilarating voice to a witch.
“Monsters are a boon for gods. Imagine all the prayers.” So says Circe, a sly, petulant, and finally commanding voice that narrates the entirety of Miller’s dazzling second novel. The writer returns to Homer, the wellspring that led her to an Orange Prize for The Song of Achilles (2012). This time, she dips into The Odyssey for the legend of Circe, a nymph who turns Odysseus’ crew of men into pigs. The novel, with its distinctive feminist tang, starts with the sentence: “When I was born, the name for what I was did not exist.” Readers will relish following the puzzle of this unpromising daughter of the sun god Helios and his wife, Perse, who had negligible use for their child. It takes banishment to the island Aeaea for Circe to sense her calling as a sorceress: “I will not be like a bird bred in a cage, I thought, too dull to fly even when the door stands open. I stepped into those woods and my life began.” This lonely, scorned figure learns herbs and potions, surrounds herself with lions, and, in a heart-stopping chapter, outwits the monster Scylla to propel Daedalus and his boat to safety. She makes lovers of Hermes and then two mortal men. She midwifes the birth of the Minotaur on Crete and performs her own C-section. And as she grows in power, she muses that “not even Odysseus could talk his way past [her] witchcraft. He had talked his way past the witch instead.” Circe’s fascination with mortals becomes the book’s marrow and delivers its thrilling ending. All the while, the supernatural sits intriguingly alongside “the tonic of ordinary things.” A few passages coil toward melodrama, and one inelegant line after a rape seems jarringly modern, but the spell holds fast. Expect Miller’s readership to mushroom like one of Circe’s spells.
Miller makes Homer pertinent to women facing 21st-century monsters.Pub Date: April 10, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-316-55634-7
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Jan. 22, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2018
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