Shrouded in sorrow and Scandinavian gloom and a central part of a masterwork of modernist literature.
The second volume in Undset’s tetralogy finds its eponymous hero battling one enemy and one moral quandary after another.
The time is the 1300s, when Norway’s king declares that his people are no longer to go out raiding as Vikings but instead are to settle down into peaceable occupations: “Men were supposed to believe, whether they liked it or not, that God would not tolerate anyone plundering a fellow Christian, even if he happened to be a foreigner.” Ask a Viking to make nice, though, and you’ve got a problem on your hands. Olav, having been an outlaw raider after killing a member of his betrothed’s family, now tries to settle down with Ingunn Steinfinnsdatter on his ancestral estate east of Oslo Fjord. It’s not an easy transition. Olav is on his way to being a good Christian, but even so the Viking is strong in him: “He was…aware that he was supposed to show remorse because the murder was considered a sin, even though he couldn’t understand why it was so sinful,” writes Undset of his original sin (but not his first killing, and not his last). In the second volume of the four devoted to Olav, we find him constantly wrestling with a conscience newly awakened by conversations with learned priests—all Catholic, naturally, considering the time, a matter that brought controversy to Undset when the novel was published in officially Lutheran Norway in 1925. He also wrestles with the presence of the son his wife bore to another man, whom Olav also killed; the boy is a constant reminder of her infidelity, even as one child after another of Olav’s is stillborn or dies soon after birth. Ingunn weakens and ages while Olav remains handsome and strong, though riven by doubt. A bonus in the story: As the volume winds to an end, Olav meets a kind fellow named Lavrans Bjørgulfssøn, who, readers may recall, is the father of the protagonist of Undset’s best-known novel, Kristin Lavransdatter.
Shrouded in sorrow and Scandinavian gloom and a central part of a masterwork of modernist literature.Pub Date: Oct. 5, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-5179-1160-7
Page Count: 280
Publisher: Univ. of Minnesota
Review Posted Online: July 27, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2021
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
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
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