Nicely nuanced, with a fine sense of place and time: good wartime fiction, but nothing very special as a romance.
In a story of the fragile peace that followed WWII in Central Europe, Moran (What Harry Saw, 2002, etc.) brings together three survivors who have a great deal to hide.
In the war’s aftermath, millions of refugees effectively no longer existed or were occupied by foreign armies. The unluckiest were those, like Anja Wienewska, who found themselves without passports or official documents of any kind. A Pole who had survived the brutal Nazi occupation of her native Krakow by working as an informer for the SS, Anja ended up, in 1945, in a displaced persons camp. There, she met Walter Fass, an engineer and former Wehrmacht officer who had lost an arm in Yugoslavia. Taking advantage of his status (i.e., his papers were in order), Anja and Walter married (she was trying to pass herself off as a German), thereby freeing her from the risk of being repatriated to Poland—where she risked being exposed as a collaborator and shot. The two moved to a small farm that Walter’s family owned just over the Italian border, and Walter found work as an engineer on one of the many reconstruction projects then underway. After the birth of a daughter, it appeared that the two were going to settle down to normal peacetime life, but their domestic happiness was interrupted by the arrival of Mila Cosic, a young Serbian woman. During the war, Mila had fought with the Chetniks, a group of partisans who had opposed first the Nazis, later the Communists. Now an Italian citizen (citizenship was extremely fluid in the years right after the war), Mila had known Walter in Yugoslavia. What was their relationship? And what did she want from him now? Most Europeans who had been through the war learned by instinct to be vague about their actions later on. But sometimes the truth could not stay submerged.
Nicely nuanced, with a fine sense of place and time: good wartime fiction, but nothing very special as a romance.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2003
ISBN: 1-57322-260-7
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Riverhead
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2003
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
Coelho's placebo has racked up impressive sales in Brazil and Europe. Americans should flock to it like gulls.
Coelho is a Brazilian writer with four books to his credit. Following Diary of a Magus (1992—not reviewed) came this book, published in Brazil in 1988: it's an interdenominational, transcendental, inspirational fable—in other words, a bag of wind.
The story is about a youth empowered to follow his dream. Santiago is an Andalusian shepherd boy who learns through a dream of a treasure in the Egyptian pyramids. An old man, the king of Salem, the first of various spiritual guides, tells the boy that he has discovered his destiny: "to realize one's destiny is a person's only real obligation." So Santiago sells his sheep, sails to Tangier, is tricked out of his money, regains it through hard work, crosses the desert with a caravan, stops at an oasis long enough to fall in love, escapes from warring tribesmen by performing a miracle, reaches the pyramids, and eventually gets both the gold and the girl. Along the way he meets an Englishman who describes the Soul of the World; the desert woman Fatima, who teaches him the Language of the World; and an alchemist who says, "Listen to your heart" A message clings like ivy to every encounter; everyone, but everyone, has to put in their two cents' worth, from the crystal merchant to the camel driver ("concentrate always on the present, you'll be a happy man"). The absence of characterization and overall blandness suggest authorship by a committee of self-improvement pundits—a far cry from Saint- Exupery's The Little Prince: that flagship of the genre was a genuine charmer because it clearly derived from a quirky, individual sensibility.
Coelho's placebo has racked up impressive sales in Brazil and Europe. Americans should flock to it like gulls.Pub Date: July 1, 1993
ISBN: 0-06-250217-4
Page Count: 192
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1993
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
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