Much less dramatic and satisfying than Yoshimura’s tightly plotted earlier fiction. A disappointment.
Here’s something different from the prizewinning Japanese author (One Man’s Justice, 2001, etc.): a historical novel about a preadolescent boy who leaves his homeland and loses his nationality.
Thirteen-year-old Hikotaro joins the crew of a merchant ship captained by his stepfather, following his mother’s death in 1850. Having transferred to another vessel, he survives a violent storm, is rescued by an American ship, and lands in San Francisco, where (having been renamed “Hikozo” by American shipmates) he learns that Japan’s ruling Shogunate’s “national seclusion policy” may prevent him from ever returning home. Indeed, throughout the next two decades his life consists of gradual assimilation into American culture (aided primarily by a kindly Baltimore revenue officer) and repeated attempts to make his way back to Japan—initially aboard a warship commanded by Commodore Perry, later as an increasingly Americanized (and expertly bilingual) clerk and interpreter employed by various governmental and commercial interests. Both increasing samurai violence against Westerners and closed opportunities caused by the US Civil War keep Hikozo (by now a naturalized American citizen, hence a.k.a. “Joseph Heco”) dangling unhappily between his native and adoptive countries—until he finally returns to Japan and eventually dies there. Storm Rider, the fourth of Yoshimura’s novels to be translated into English, is a hastily narrated and curiously muted story, burdened with excess exposition and awkward construction (e.g., his tendency to flatten scenes with interpolated summaries of peripheral characters’ subsequent histories). Its action is tediously redundant (though not at all uninteresting). Furthermore, Hikozo is an essentially opaque character who appears to lack sexual or romantic feelings, or any emotions beyond homesickness—and has a Zelig-like capacity for briefly encountering historical characters who have little to do with the story of his life on which we wish Yoshimura would concentrate more fully.
Much less dramatic and satisfying than Yoshimura’s tightly plotted earlier fiction. A disappointment.Pub Date: May 1, 2004
ISBN: 0-15-100667-9
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Harcourt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2004
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
A fiercely written, deeply upsetting, and beautifully human novel.
The brutal murder of a 15-year-old boy during the 1980 Gwangju Uprising becomes the connective tissue between the isolated characters of this emotionally harrowing novel.
In May 1980, student demonstrations ignited a popular uprising in the South Korean city of Gwangju. The police and military responded with ruthless violence, and Han (The Vegetarian, 2015) begins her novel in the middle of a disorienting atmosphere of human-inflicted horror. While searching for a friend, a young boy named Dong-ho joins a team of volunteers who look after the bodies of demonstrators who were killed. He keeps a ledger with details on each corpse, pins a number to its chest, and keeps candles lit beside the ones with no family to grieve beside them. The details of this world seep off the page in a series of sickening but precisely composed images. Han’s evocation of savagery and grief is shockingly sensory and visceral but never approximate or unrestrained. Each character’s voice seems to ring in its own space, and though they are all connected by Dong-ho’s experiences in Gwangju, they exist in an uncanny isolation. The novel is divided into seven parts: six acts that each focus on a different character and an epilogue that pulls in the author herself. The parts shift in time from 1980 to 2013 and in point of view, making the reader intimate or complicit to different degrees with the voice of a dead person, a survivor of torture, a mother suffering from regret and memory. Han explores the sprawling trauma of political brutality with impressive nuance and the piercing emotional truth that comes with masterful fiction. In her epilogue she writes, “Soundlessly, and without fuss, some tender thing deep inside me broke.” Her novel is likely to provoke an echo of that moment in its readers.
A fiercely written, deeply upsetting, and beautifully human novel.Pub Date: Jan. 17, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-101-90672-9
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Hogarth
Review Posted Online: Oct. 4, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2016
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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