A far cry from his collection of contemporary stories, Legacies (1996), this first novel by Norton's editor in chief is a tale of romance and honor set against the turbulent Balkans just before WW I—a setting with particular relevance to current events. Foreshadowing present-day conflicts in the region, Lawrence incorporates lots of information into his narrative about the various groups with a stake in the area. Lawrence, though, wears his research lightly and uses a protagonist—Auberon Harwell, an Englishman—who, like the reader, learns as he goes along. A spy for powerful British interests, Auberon poses as a botanist interested in the unique flora of Montenegro, the one region of Serbia not controlled by the Turks. Traveling inland from the Adriatic, he stops first in the mountain village of Cetinje, where the British ambassador reveals his contempt for the natives and where Auberon romances a young missionary, Lydia Wadham, who teaches in the local girls' academy. Lydia also provides Auberon with an introduction to a powerful local clan that lives on the furthest border of Montenegro, near a strategic valley controlled by Moslems. There, Auberon befriends Danilo Pekoevi, a hero in the local resistance movement opposing the Turks, whose wife, Sofia, hopes to see Toma, her only remaining son, escape to America. Mostly out of love for the beautiful Sofia, Auberon helps Toma escape his violent patrimony, but not before the young man makes the local situation worse by impregnating a local Moslem girl, whose clan insists on a wedding. When she commits suicide, the fragile peace is breached, and Auberon's escape with Toma assumes heroic dimensions. In fact, the novel itself thrives on this very conflict between heroism and the demands of realpolitik. Lawrence's simple notion—that the heart can't always have what it wants—is enriched by the exotic textures of his setting. A lush, middlebrow drama that's perfect for the big screen—and could easily become the next English Patient, given the right director.
Pub Date: Aug. 11, 1997
ISBN: 0-374-21407-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1997
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 phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.
Four men who meet as college roommates move to New York and spend the next three decades gaining renown in their professions—as an architect, painter, actor and lawyer—and struggling with demons in their intertwined personal lives.
Yanagihara (The People in the Trees, 2013) takes the still-bold leap of writing about characters who don’t share her background; in addition to being male, JB is African-American, Malcolm has a black father and white mother, Willem is white, and “Jude’s race was undetermined”—deserted at birth, he was raised in a monastery and had an unspeakably traumatic childhood that’s revealed slowly over the course of the book. Two of them are gay, one straight and one bisexual. There isn’t a single significant female character, and for a long novel, there isn’t much plot. There aren’t even many markers of what’s happening in the outside world; Jude moves to a loft in SoHo as a young man, but we don’t see the neighborhood change from gritty artists’ enclave to glitzy tourist destination. What we get instead is an intensely interior look at the friends’ psyches and relationships, and it’s utterly enthralling. The four men think about work and creativity and success and failure; they cook for each other, compete with each other and jostle for each other’s affection. JB bases his entire artistic career on painting portraits of his friends, while Malcolm takes care of them by designing their apartments and houses. When Jude, as an adult, is adopted by his favorite Harvard law professor, his friends join him for Thanksgiving in Cambridge every year. And when Willem becomes a movie star, they all bask in his glow. Eventually, the tone darkens and the story narrows to focus on Jude as the pain of his past cuts deep into his carefully constructed life.
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.Pub Date: March 10, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-385-53925-8
Page Count: 720
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Dec. 21, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2015
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