This leisurely curtain raiser, a gloriously devoted poem to England’s past, springs to life in its final chapters.
In the foreground of a reverent portrait of pre–World War I England, a talented boy’s life is set in motion.
Opening his ninth novel in 1911 on a Somerset estate, Pears (In the Light of Morning, 2015, etc.) unspools a panorama of rural existence from the perspective of the laboring classes. The Sercombe family works some of the land belonging to Lord Prideaux, aka “the master,” following an age-old, effortful seasonal round which allots predictable roles to men, women, and animals. The blacksmith keeps the forge, the sawyer saws the trees, and Albert Sercombe, a carter, runs a stable of horses to plough and harvest. The perspective of 12-year-old son Leo, “another Sercombe with equine blood in his bones,” shapes the narrative, as he skips school to spend time in the stables: attending the birth of a foal, getting his backside bitten when climbing into the saddle, and bringing his first colt to halter. Dramatic events are few in this lovingly detailed almanac of a tale, which devotes pages to the harnessing of horses, the reaping of crops, and the practicing of trades and crafts now lost to modern agriculture, along with their vocabulary (“zart,” “strouters,” “felloe”). Meanwhile, Leo has struck up an acquaintance with Miss Charlotte, the master’s willful, horse-loving daughter, and also impressed her father with his instinctive riding ability. An inescapable sense of scene-setting underpins this first volume in a proposed trilogy, alongside a feel of familiarity as the shadow of war stretches toward this eternal landscape with its shooting parties, intuitive working folk, and noble beasts. “Things’ll carry on one way or another. Naught for us to worry over,” Albert assures his wife, yet the novel closes on a turning-point event and a great act of sundering.
This leisurely curtain raiser, a gloriously devoted poem to England’s past, springs to life in its final chapters.Pub Date: Feb. 28, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-63286-693-6
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Bloomsbury
Review Posted Online: Dec. 6, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2016
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
A deeply satisfying novel, both sensuously vivid and remarkably poignant.
Norwegian novelist Jacobsen folds a quietly powerful coming-of-age story into a rendition of daily life on one of Norway’s rural islands a hundred years ago in a novel that was shortlisted for the 2017 Man Booker International Prize.
Ingrid Barrøy, her father, Hans, mother, Maria, grandfather Martin, and slightly addled aunt Barbro are the owners and sole inhabitants of Barrøy Island, one of numerous small family-owned islands in an area of Norway barely touched by the outside world. The novel follows Ingrid from age 3 through a carefree early childhood of endless small chores, simple pleasures, and unquestioned familial love into her more ambivalent adolescence attending school off the island and becoming aware of the outside world, then finally into young womanhood when she must make difficult choices. Readers will share Ingrid’s adoration of her father, whose sense of responsibility conflicts with his romantic nature. He adores Maria, despite what he calls her “la-di-da” ways, and is devoted to Ingrid. Twice he finds work on the mainland for his sister, Barbro, but, afraid she’ll be unhappy, he brings her home both times. Rooted to the land where he farms and tied to the sea where he fishes, Hans struggles to maintain his family’s hardscrabble existence on an island where every repair is a struggle against the elements. But his efforts are Sisyphean. Life as a Barrøy on Barrøy remains precarious. Changes do occur in men’s and women’s roles, reflected in part by who gets a literal chair to sit on at meals, while world crises—a war, Sweden’s financial troubles—have unexpected impact. Yet the drama here occurs in small increments, season by season, following nature’s rhythm through deaths and births, moments of joy and deep sorrow. The translator’s decision to use roughly translated phrases in conversation—i.e., “Tha’s goen’ nohvar” for "You’re going nowhere")—slows the reading down at first but ends up drawing readers more deeply into the world of Barrøy and its prickly, intensely alive inhabitants.
A deeply satisfying novel, both sensuously vivid and remarkably poignant.Pub Date: April 7, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-77196-319-0
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Biblioasis
Review Posted Online: Jan. 12, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2020
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