Provocative ideas straitjacketed in an overdetermined plot.
Three grieving men’s odysseys fitfully interconnect in this latest meditation on loss, faith, and belonging from Martel (Beatrice and Virgil, 2010, etc.).
In December 1904, Tomás leaves Lisbon in a new car he hardly knows how to drive. Since the deaths a year ago of his servant lover, their young son, and his father, he has become obsessed with the 17th-century diary of a Portuguese priest stationed in Africa who wrote of making a special kind of crucifix that Tomás believes ended up in the high mountains of Portugal. After a long journey that makes vividly palpable the perils of early-20th-century motoring, he finds the crucifix, makes a dramatic pronouncement about it that reveals his personal fury at the god who robbed him of everyone he loved—and this first portion of the novel abruptly ends. Cut to New Year’s Eve 1938, as pathologist Eusebio Lozora, catching up on work at the hospital, receives an odd visit from his devoutly religious wife and an even odder one from a woman carrying a suitcase containing her dead husband’s body, on which she insists Eusebio immediately perform an autopsy. The autopsy’s outré results seem to have some link to the crucifix Tomás found, but rather than elucidating, Martel piles on more bizarre developments before once again chopping off his narrative with multiple dangling ends. Both of these sections are extremely readable, with strongly developed characters whose intriguing stories make it frustrating when they are truncated. This authorial strategy might be acceptable if the third section, set in 1981—which features human/animal interaction as provocative and moving as the one in Martel’s mega-selling Life of Pi (2001)—drew together these narrative strands in a way that made sense of the novel’s spiritual and artistic themes. Instead, we get by-the-numbers connections of incidents and family relations that obscure Martel’s much more interesting musings on how we deal with tragedy and find our true home.
Provocative ideas straitjacketed in an overdetermined plot.Pub Date: Feb. 2, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9717-0
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: Nov. 16, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
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
Tinny perhaps, but still a minutely rendered and impressively steady feminist vision of apocalypse.
The time is the not-so-distant future, when the US's spiraling social freedoms have finally called down a reaction, an Iranian-style repressive "monotheocracy" calling itself the Republic of Gilead—a Bible-thumping, racist, capital-punishing, and misogynistic rule that would do away with pleasure altogether were it not for one thing: that the Gileadan women, pure and true (as opposed to all the nonbelieving women, those who've ever been adulterous or married more than once), are found rarely fertile.
Thus are drafted a whole class of "handmaids," whose function is to bear the children of the elite, to be fecund or else (else being certain death, sent out to be toxic-waste removers on outlying islands). The narrative frame for Atwood's dystopian vision is the hopeless private testimony of one of these surrogate mothers, Offred ("of" plus the name of her male protector). Lying cradled by the body of the barren wife, being meanwhile serviced by the husband, Offred's "ceremony" must be successful—if she does not want to join the ranks of the other disappeared (which include her mother, her husband—dead—and small daughter, all taken away during the years of revolt). One Of her only human conduits is a gradually developing affair with her master's chauffeur—something that's balanced more than offset, though, by the master's hypocritically un-Puritan use of her as a kind of B-girl at private parties held by the ruling men in a spirit of nostalgia and lust. This latter relationship, edging into real need (the master's), is very effectively done; it highlights the handmaid's (read Everywoman's) eternal exploitation, profane or sacred ("We are two-legged wombs, that's all: sacred vessels, ambulatory chalices"). Atwood, to her credit, creates a chillingly specific, imaginable night-mare. The book is short on characterization—this is Atwood, never a warm writer, at her steeliest—and long on cynicism—it's got none of the human credibility of a work such as Walker Percy's Love In The Ruins. But the scariness is visceral, a world that's like a dangerous and even fatal grid, an electrified fence.
Tinny perhaps, but still a minutely rendered and impressively steady feminist vision of apocalypse.Pub Date: Feb. 17, 1985
ISBN: 038549081X
Page Count: -
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
Review Posted Online: Sept. 16, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 1985
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
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