A flat-out masterpiece: exhilarating and unforgettable.
The impassioned memories of German twin sisters separated in childhood and ever afterward by “the silly obstacles tossed up by history”: that’s the core of this brilliant 1993 novel by a hitherto untranslated Dutch writer.
Anna and Lotte Goudriaan, born in Cologne, are effectively orphaned in early childhood (in the “Interbellum” following WWI) when their mother’s death and their father’s mortal illness send resourceful Anna to be brought up on her grandfather’s farm in a nearby village, and frail Lotte to live with an uncle’s family in the Netherlands. Except for two brief reunions before and after the subsequent war, they live far apart until the 1990s, when by sheer chance they meet again as elderly patients at a spa in Belgium. At first mutually wary, they exchange detailed memories of each other’s past: Lotte’s survival of German occupation during WWII in a household that hides fugitive Jews from the Nazis (an echo of The Diary of Anne Frank) and Anna’s more overtly dramatic life as domestic slave to her choleric relatives (at whose hands she suffers a savage beating that leaves her permanently infertile), chambermaid to an aristocratic anti-Hitler family, wife of a doomed young SS officer, and embittered Red Cross nurse during the war’s final days. De Loo quickly establishes a hypnotic narrative rhythm, juxtaposing the sisters’ richly detailed contrasting reminiscences against their tenuous renewed intimacy, eroded by Anna’s scorn for Lotte’s essentially safe passage through the crucible of conflict and the latter’s barely concealed contempt for Anna’s stubborn solidarity with “ordinary” German people. Has there ever been, one wonders, a more imaginative and moving dramatization of the human cost of the divisions and destruction wreaked by Hitler’s madness? Quite likely not. De Loo’s profoundly elegiac closing pages are a triumph of compassionate empathy, not only for both “sides,” but also for each of these magnificently realized women’s sorrows, sacrifices, and capacity to somehow endure.
A flat-out masterpiece: exhilarating and unforgettable.Pub Date: Aug. 1, 2000
ISBN: 1-56947-200-9
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Soho
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2000
BOOK REVIEW
An illuminating read for anyone interested in the inner workings of the Catholic Church; for prelate-fiction superfans, it...
Harris, creator of grand, symphonic thrillers from Fatherland (1992) to An Officer and a Spy (2014), scores with a chamber piece of a novel set in the Vatican in the days after a fictional pope dies.
Fictional, yes, but the nameless pontiff has a lot in common with our own Francis: He’s famously humble, shunning the lavish Apostolic Palace for a small apartment, and he is committed to leading a church that engages with the world and its problems. In the aftermath of his sudden death, rumors circulate about the pope’s intention to fire certain cardinals. At the center of the action is Cardinal Lomeli, Dean of the College of Cardinals, whose job it is to manage the conclave that will elect a new pope. He believes it is also his duty to uncover what the pope knew before he died because some of the cardinals in question are in the running to succeed him. “In the running” is an apt phrase because, as described by Harris, the papal conclave is the ultimate political backroom—albeit a room, the Sistine Chapel, covered with Michelangelo frescoes. Vying for the papal crown are an African cardinal whom many want to see as the first black pope, a press-savvy Canadian, an Italian arch-conservative (think Cardinal Scalia), and an Italian liberal who wants to continue the late pope’s campaign to modernize the church. The novel glories in the ancient rituals that constitute the election process while still grounding that process in the real world: the Sistine Chapel is fitted with jamming devices to thwart electronic eavesdropping, and the pressure to act quickly is increased because “rumours that the pope is dead are already trending on social media.”
An illuminating read for anyone interested in the inner workings of the Catholic Church; for prelate-fiction superfans, it is pure temptation.Pub Date: Nov. 22, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-451-49344-6
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Sept. 6, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2016
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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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