A bleak, affecting portrait that points to immeasurable collateral damage.
A Jewish man in 1940 Argentina confronts his mother’s fate when she’s confined in the Warsaw ghetto.
Born in Argentina, Amigorena grew up in France, whose language he writes in and where this novel has been nominated for several prizes, including the Prix Goncourt. It is part of a series of autobiographical novels the author, also a prolific screenwriter, has been writing since the 1990s, and in a preface, he calls the present novel “the source” of the project. The last chapter clarifies the connection. The narrative follows a few years in the life of Vicente Rosenberg, who moved to Argentina from Poland in 1928, leaving behind his mother. Despite her many letters pleading for a response, he does not write to her for years, even as antisemitism rises in Europe. Then German troops invade Poland and the Nazis create the Warsaw ghetto. Shortly after the novel opens in late 1940, Vicente gets a letter in which his mother describes hardships in the ghetto and asks him to send money. He thinks of all the chances he had to get her out of Warsaw. He feels the onset of a “sense of the guilt that he would never truly erase from his heart.” The novel tracks the deepening of this guilt and its effect on Vicente and his wife and three children. In the next few years, the letters stop and news of the death camps starts to reach Vicente. His life becomes a “desolate void” in which “his wife and children scarcely existed.” He stops speaking and gambles compulsively. Amigorena charts the man’s guilt-driven psychological deterioration in careful detail, from small matters (“What difference would it make whether or not he ate more gnocchi?”) to abject misery. Even in extremes of emotion, the translation offers controlled, lucid prose.
A bleak, affecting portrait that points to immeasurable collateral damage.Pub Date: Aug. 23, 2022
ISBN: 978-0-06-301833-4
Page Count: 176
Publisher: HarperVia
Review Posted Online: May 24, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2022
A dramatic, vividly detailed reconstruction of a little-known aspect of the Vietnam War.
A young woman’s experience as a nurse in Vietnam casts a deep shadow over her life.
When we learn that the farewell party in the opening scene is for Frances “Frankie” McGrath’s older brother—“a golden boy, a wild child who could make the hardest heart soften”—who is leaving to serve in Vietnam in 1966, we feel pretty certain that poor Finley McGrath is marked for death. Still, it’s a surprise when the fateful doorbell rings less than 20 pages later. His death inspires his sister to enlist as an Army nurse, and this turn of events is just the beginning of a roller coaster of a plot that’s impressive and engrossing if at times a bit formulaic. Hannah renders the experiences of the young women who served in Vietnam in all-encompassing detail. The first half of the book, set in gore-drenched hospital wards, mildewed dorm rooms, and boozy officers’ clubs, is an exciting read, tracking the transformation of virginal, uptight Frankie into a crack surgical nurse and woman of the world. Her tensely platonic romance with a married surgeon ends when his broken, unbreathing body is airlifted out by helicopter; she throws her pent-up passion into a wild affair with a soldier who happens to be her dead brother’s best friend. In the second part of the book, after the war, Frankie seems to experience every possible bad break. A drawback of the story is that none of the secondary characters in her life are fully three-dimensional: Her dismissive, chauvinistic father and tight-lipped, pill-popping mother, her fellow nurses, and her various love interests are more plot devices than people. You’ll wish you could have gone to Vegas and placed a bet on the ending—while it’s against all the odds, you’ll see it coming from a mile away.
A dramatic, vividly detailed reconstruction of a little-known aspect of the Vietnam War.Pub Date: Feb. 6, 2024
ISBN: 9781250178633
Page Count: 480
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Nov. 4, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2023
PERSPECTIVES
BOOK TO SCREEN
SEEN & HEARD
Uneven but fitfully amusing.
Betrayed by her husband, a severely depressed young woman gets drawn into the over-the-top festivities at a lavish wedding.
Phoebe Stone, who teaches English literature at a St. Louis college, is plotting her own demise. Her husband, Matt, has left her for another woman, and Phoebe is taking it hard. Indeed, she's determined just where and how she will end it all: at an oceanfront hotel in Newport, where she will lie on a king-sized canopy bed and take a bottle of her cat’s painkillers. At the hotel, Phoebe meets bride-to-be Lila, a headstrong rich girl presiding over her own extravagant six-day wedding celebration. Lila thought she had booked every room in the hotel, and learning of Phoebe's suicidal intentions, she forbids this stray guest from disrupting the nuptials: “No. You definitely can’t kill yourself. This is my wedding week.” After the punchy opening, a grim flashback to the meltdown of Phoebe's marriage temporarily darkens the mood, but things pick up when spoiled Lila interrupts Phoebe's preparations and sweeps her up in the wedding juggernaut. The slide from earnest drama to broad farce is somewhat jarring, but from this point on, Espach crafts an enjoyable—if overstuffed—comedy of manners. When the original maid of honor drops out, Phoebe is persuaded, against her better judgment, to take her place. There’s some fun to be had here: The wedding party—including groom-to-be Gary, a widower, and his 11-year-old daughter—takes surfing lessons; the women in the group have a session with a Sex Woman. But it all goes on too long, and the humor can seem forced, reaching a low point when someone has sex with the vintage wedding car (you don’t want to know the details). Later, when two characters have a meet-cute in a hot tub, readers will guess exactly how the marriage plot resolves.
Uneven but fitfully amusing.Pub Date: July 30, 2024
ISBN: 9781250899576
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: Sept. 13, 2024
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