It seems clear that the works of rebellious Soviet writers have passed from the period of the "thaw" to that of power politics on an international scale. Certainly, Solzhenitsyn's world famous account of a Siberian labor camp, One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, saw print principally because Khrushchev was able to use it as an anti-Stalinist ploy. Now with much fanfare, and against the wishes of the Kremlin, we have a "pirated" edition of The First Circle, probably Solzhenitsyn's major effort, a novel not only anti-Stalinist in strategy, or even anti-Soviet, but, at least in sensibility, profoundly anti-Communist as well. True, Rubin, one of the noblest characters, defends the faith, but he does so pretty much the way those Irishmen in Joyce defend Catholicism, all the while wishing to rid Ireland of churches and priests. Of course, despite the sly attitudes taken towards Marx or the scornful glimpses of Western fellow-travelers, what Solzhenitsyn really mourns is not les dieux ont soif, not the revolution consuming its children. Rather, like his "renegade" brethren, Pasternak and Pilnyak, Zamyatin and Bulgakov, for Solzhenitsyn what haunts the Bolshevik Heartbreak House is the wreckage of cultural continuity and individuation, the abandonment of reason to terror. Thus, his mammoth tale (the setting is Moscow and a grubby scientific institute where the technicians are political prisoners), though arranged in interlocking, multi-leveled scenes, and all manner of narrative incidents and types, ultimately draws its sustenance from one figure, the skeptical, inwardly sorrowing, unsubmissive Nerzhin, the hero as victim, the "survivor" with honor. Against him, in a short but extraordinary sequence, stands "The Boss," maniacally menacing, with burlesque touches: "Before a big war," says Stalin, "a big purge is necessary." Solzhenitsyn's not a graceful writer; in everything but ideology he's close to socialist realism. Still, at his best, he has composed a sardonic, shattering work, with the memorable scenes between prisoners ironically rivaling those in Gorky's The Lower Depths.... From Tsarist Russia to "The Boss," what a painfully repetitive uphill struggle, what a terrible world.
Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1968
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: -
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: Oct. 5, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1968
A tasty, if not always tasteful, tale of supernatural mayhem that fans of King and Crichton alike will enjoy.
Are we not men? We are—well, ask Bigfoot, as Brooks does in this delightful yarn, following on his bestseller World War Z(2006).
A zombie apocalypse is one thing. A volcanic eruption is quite another, for, as the journalist who does a framing voice-over narration for Brooks’ latest puts it, when Mount Rainier popped its cork, “it was the psychological aspect, the hyperbole-fueled hysteria that had ended up killing the most people.” Maybe, but the sasquatches whom the volcano displaced contributed to the statistics, too, if only out of self-defense. Brooks places the epicenter of the Bigfoot war in a high-tech hideaway populated by the kind of people you might find in a Jurassic Park franchise: the schmo who doesn’t know how to do much of anything but tries anyway, the well-intentioned bleeding heart, the know-it-all intellectual who turns out to know the wrong things, the immigrant with a tough backstory and an instinct for survival. Indeed, the novel does double duty as a survival manual, packed full of good advice—for instance, try not to get wounded, for “injury turns you from a giver to a taker. Taking up our resources, our time to care for you.” Brooks presents a case for making room for Bigfoot in the world while peppering his narrative with timely social criticism about bad behavior on the human side of the conflict: The explosion of Rainier might have been better forecast had the president not slashed the budget of the U.S. Geological Survey, leading to “immediate suspension of the National Volcano Early Warning System,” and there’s always someone around looking to monetize the natural disaster and the sasquatch-y onslaught that follows. Brooks is a pro at building suspense even if it plays out in some rather spectacularly yucky episodes, one involving a short spear that takes its name from “the sucking sound of pulling it out of the dead man’s heart and lungs.” Grossness aside, it puts you right there on the scene.
A tasty, if not always tasteful, tale of supernatural mayhem that fans of King and Crichton alike will enjoy.Pub Date: June 16, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-9848-2678-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Del Rey/Ballantine
Review Posted Online: Feb. 9, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK TO SCREEN
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
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