A ghostly evocation of faded but eternally repulsive history.
The stories of a Belgian “Jew-hunter for the Waffen-SS,” his family, and their home are reassembled through a combination of historical fact and the author’s imagination.
“In the first year of the new millennium, a book came into my hands from which I learned that for twenty years I had lived in the house of a former SS man.” So begins Flemish author Hertmans’ coolly intriguing re-creation of the life and circumstances of Willem Verhulst, whose commitment to Flemish Nationalism led to an allegiance with Hitler and the German Reich. Son of a “Bad” Fleming, the book that revealed the house's connection to the Nazis, was written by Verhulst’s son, Adriaan, and lends much detail on the father’s shameful story, as do various other sources, including the diaries of Adriaan’s mother, Mientje, and the reminiscences of his two sisters. Verhulst’s early life is quirky but inauspicious. The sight in one of his eyes is damaged in a convulsion. He studies horticulture in Brussels and takes a Jewish lover, Elsa Meissner, marrying her before her divorce is complete. Elsa succumbs to cancer, but before she dies Verhulst is already flirting with devout Mientje, who, as wife No. 2, will suffer worse from her husband’s promiscuity. Resident in Ghent but often absent, Verhulst’s politics align him so that when war begins and the Germans invade Belgium, he’s happy to work for the occupiers and reap the benefits. Hertmans precisely locates Verhulst in the Ghent house, where Mientje forbids him to wear his SS uniform indoors though a bust of Hitler sits on a mantelpiece. His crimes are more outlined than specified, but the mood and the corruption are nicely mirrored in the rotting, tainted house Hertmans later buys and inhabits. As much a story of the family and the setting as of the horrible yet ludicrous figure at its center, the book, while overlong, delivers a haunting, detailed record of people, place, and atmosphere.
A ghostly evocation of faded but eternally repulsive history.Pub Date: Aug. 29, 2023
ISBN: 9780593316467
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Pantheon
Review Posted Online: July 13, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2023
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
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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
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