A fun romp through Paris and history, one that nevertheless makes us understand that the sins of the past are not truly past.
A melancholy and mournful tale of the past's inextricable relationship to the present.
Faulks (Pistache Returns, 2017, etc.) gives us a novel that uses World War II as a way to think about the contemporary refugee crisis and nationalist politics in Europe. He brings us the story of Tariq, a lovelorn, disaffected, and perpetually aroused Algerian teenager whose unfulfilling studies and infatuation with his virginal classmate Laila fill him with romantic dreams of fleeing his home for the streets of Europe. The son of a half-French, half-Arab woman whose father was a French settler, Tariq eventually abandons Algeria for Paris. Meanwhile, an American academic named Hannah arrives in Paris in order to do research on a historical project about the lives of Parisian women under the Vichy government during the war. Hannah is more concerned with the past than the present, but she feels increasingly empty in her history-obsessed life. As Tariq floats through the streets of Paris, looking for shelter and work, his and Hannah's paths eventually cross; soon, Tariq is a lodger in Hannah's apartment. Eventually, however, Hannah's obsession with the past collides with Tariq's complicated family history. Tariq soon finds that the hatred and xenophobia that drove French complicity with Nazi Germany and the settling of Algeria have not evaporated but taken on more subtle manifestations. Narrated in the first person from both Hannah's and Tariq's perspectives, this is a briskly told and engaging novel that sets us in the bustling streets of mid-2000s Paris. However, the prose is workmanlike, even dull at times, never rising to the lyrical heights of books whose subject matter this shares. The comparison might be unfair, but it's hard not to recall novels like Sebald's gorgeous Austerlitz when reading this novel, which suffers for the comparison. Tariq's and Hannah's voices are occasionally unconvincing. Taking Tariq as a hard-up teenage Algerian runaway is difficult when, after running into a mysteriously familiar woman on the Paris Metro, he utters, "I felt she was meant for me as the man I could become, as the man I deep down already am—an older, better man beneath all the clumsy, unimportant stuff of being young and useless and being me." Most unfortunately, the novel's twists are easy to see coming. Still, this is an entertaining novel with memorable characters.
A fun romp through Paris and history, one that nevertheless makes us understand that the sins of the past are not truly past.Pub Date: Nov. 6, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-250-30565-7
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: Sept. 1, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
The Brat Pack meets The Bacchae in this precious, way-too-long, and utterly unsuspenseful town-and-gown murder tale. A bunch of ever-so-mandarin college kids in a small Vermont school are the eager epigones of an aloof classics professor, and in their exclusivity and snobbishness and eagerness to please their teacher, they are moved to try to enact Dionysian frenzies in the woods. During the only one that actually comes off, a local farmer happens upon them—and they kill him. But the death isn't ruled a murder—and might never have been if one of the gang—a cadging sybarite named Bunny Corcoran—hadn't shown signs of cracking under the secret's weight. And so he too is dispatched. The narrator, a blank-slate Californian named Richard Pepen chronicles the coverup. But if you're thinking remorse-drama, conscience masque, or even semi-trashy who'll-break-first? page-turner, forget it: This is a straight gee-whiz, first-to-have-ever-noticed college novel—"Hampden College, as a body, was always strangely prone to hysteria. Whether from isolation, malice, or simple boredom, people there were far more credulous and excitable than educated people are generally thought to be, and this hermetic, overheated atmosphere made it a thriving black petri dish of melodrama and distortion." First-novelist Tartt goes muzzy when she has to describe human confrontations (the murder, or sex, or even the ping-ponging of fear), and is much more comfortable in transcribing aimless dorm-room paranoia or the TV shows that the malefactors anesthetize themselves with as fate ticks down. By telegraphing the murders, Tartt wants us to be continually horrified at these kids—while inviting us to semi-enjoy their manneristic fetishes and refined tastes. This ersatz-Fitzgerald mix of moralizing and mirror-looking (Jay McInerney shook and poured the shaker first) is very 80's—and in Tartt's strenuous version already seems dated, formulaic. Les Nerds du Mal—and about as deep (if not nearly as involving) as a TV movie.
Pub Date: Sept. 16, 1992
ISBN: 1400031702
Page Count: 592
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1992
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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