As the Russian-born French author’s dual literary citizenship suggests, he may really be both his generation’s Chekhov and...
The attempt to record the star-crossed story of two lovers who meet on a WWII battlefield makes up Makine’s limpid eighth novel (following A Hero’s Daughter, 2003, etc.).
An unnamed narrator initially describes his own experiences growing up in a dilapidated Russian orphanage in the 1960s, when Nikita Khrushchev has been officially denounced and the narrator and his comrades ape their elders’ revisions of history by contriving “heroic myths” featuring their unknown fathers. The narrator is befriended by a French nurse who has spent many years in Russia and, from the nurse’s piecemeal fragments of memory, learns the history of the eponymous Jacques Dorme, a French fighter pilot who was captured and interred in a makeshift German POW camp, whence he escaped, made his way eastward, and joined a Russian bomber squadron—and briefly encountered the nurse (renamed Alexandra), to whom their “single week [together] had been a long life of love.” In the final section, the narrator travels to the village where Dorme grew up and confides to the pilot’s sole survivor his own conflicted wish to reshape as a novel his homage to lives destroyed by war, in an effort to assert and perhaps finally fully understand “their deep connection to what I am.” Makine handles this moving story’s tricky time shifts expertly, and—except for a handful too many romantic wartime clichés—creates satisfyingly complex images of a lonely boy dreaming his way into a fuller reality, a stranger in strange lands seeking comfort through human connection, and a courageous woman who knows exactly how much happiness she dares to expect. And nobody surpasses Makine as a maker of stunning visuals—such as the recurring memory of a snapped necklace, beads cascading onto a floor—which subtly underscore his narrative’s plangent romantic momentum.
As the Russian-born French author’s dual literary citizenship suggests, he may really be both his generation’s Chekhov and its Proust.Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2005
ISBN: 1-55970-739-9
Page Count: 216
Publisher: Arcade
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2004
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
Suspenseful, full of incident, and not obviously necessary.
Atwood goes back to Gilead.
The Handmaid’s Tale (1985), consistently regarded as a masterpiece of 20th-century literature, has gained new attention in recent years with the success of the Hulu series as well as fresh appreciation from readers who feel like this story has new relevance in America’s current political climate. Atwood herself has spoken about how news headlines have made her dystopian fiction seem eerily plausible, and it’s not difficult to imagine her wanting to revisit Gilead as the TV show has sped past where her narrative ended. Like the novel that preceded it, this sequel is presented as found documents—first-person accounts of life inside a misogynistic theocracy from three informants. There is Agnes Jemima, a girl who rejects the marriage her family arranges for her but still has faith in God and Gilead. There’s Daisy, who learns on her 16th birthday that her whole life has been a lie. And there's Aunt Lydia, the woman responsible for turning women into Handmaids. This approach gives readers insight into different aspects of life inside and outside Gilead, but it also leads to a book that sometimes feels overstuffed. The Handmaid’s Tale combined exquisite lyricism with a powerful sense of urgency, as if a thoughtful, perceptive woman was racing against time to give witness to her experience. That narrator hinted at more than she said; Atwood seemed to trust readers to fill in the gaps. This dynamic created an atmosphere of intimacy. However curious we might be about Gilead and the resistance operating outside that country, what we learn here is that what Atwood left unsaid in the first novel generated more horror and outrage than explicit detail can. And the more we get to know Agnes, Daisy, and Aunt Lydia, the less convincing they become. It’s hard, of course, to compete with a beloved classic, so maybe the best way to read this new book is to forget about The Handmaid’s Tale and enjoy it as an artful feminist thriller.
Suspenseful, full of incident, and not obviously necessary.Pub Date: Sept. 10, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-385-54378-1
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Nan A. Talese
Review Posted Online: Sept. 3, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2019
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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