The story is much better told in Helen Waddell’s deservedly popular 1933 classic Peter Abelard.
One of history’s great loves is reexamined by a former French publishing executive.
Here, the tale of Heloise and Abelard is narrated by the fictional William of Oxford, an itinerant young copyist whose wanderings take him, in 1116, to the abbey of Fontrevault and two life-altering encounters. The first is with eminent scholar-teacher-theologian Peter Abelard, who has by his 40th year become both revered and reviled for the matchless rational powers that take the forms of “his audacity and his blasphemous comparisons.” The second is with the beautiful Heloise, niece and ward of powerful Canon Fulbert—with whom William falls instantly and unrequitedly in love. Over the succeeding years, repressing his yearnings, William becomes Abelard’s devoted disciple and a pained witness to the great teacher’s passionate appropriation of the willing Heloise, herself possessed of an intellect as powerful and hungry as is the romantic desire Abelard stirs in her. As William moves in and out of Abelard’s orbit, the famous story is told: of the lovers’ “secret marriage” and the birth of their son; Canon Fulbert’s violent revenge (the castration of his niece’s seducer); Abelard’s distracted transformation from argumentative rebel into “a man of God who has been punished but purified”; and the years of separation, ending with Abelard’s death and Heloise’s renunciation of the world as she becomes a respected abbess. Audouard has researched his materials impeccably and constructed a sometimes affecting but otherwise middling narrative. The problem is William. Audouard’s emphasis on his emotions distracts attention from his lovers—and William’s arbitrary journeys and meetings never become anything but storytelling strategies. Only at end, when the celebrated exchange of letters from which the world knows of Heloise and Abelard is finally acknowledged, do we understand why Audouard created this really unnecessary character.
The story is much better told in Helen Waddell’s deservedly popular 1933 classic Peter Abelard.Pub Date: Aug. 6, 2004
ISBN: 0-618-15286-5
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2004
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
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.
Four men who meet as college roommates move to New York and spend the next three decades gaining renown in their professions—as an architect, painter, actor and lawyer—and struggling with demons in their intertwined personal lives.
Yanagihara (The People in the Trees, 2013) takes the still-bold leap of writing about characters who don’t share her background; in addition to being male, JB is African-American, Malcolm has a black father and white mother, Willem is white, and “Jude’s race was undetermined”—deserted at birth, he was raised in a monastery and had an unspeakably traumatic childhood that’s revealed slowly over the course of the book. Two of them are gay, one straight and one bisexual. There isn’t a single significant female character, and for a long novel, there isn’t much plot. There aren’t even many markers of what’s happening in the outside world; Jude moves to a loft in SoHo as a young man, but we don’t see the neighborhood change from gritty artists’ enclave to glitzy tourist destination. What we get instead is an intensely interior look at the friends’ psyches and relationships, and it’s utterly enthralling. The four men think about work and creativity and success and failure; they cook for each other, compete with each other and jostle for each other’s affection. JB bases his entire artistic career on painting portraits of his friends, while Malcolm takes care of them by designing their apartments and houses. When Jude, as an adult, is adopted by his favorite Harvard law professor, his friends join him for Thanksgiving in Cambridge every year. And when Willem becomes a movie star, they all bask in his glow. Eventually, the tone darkens and the story narrows to focus on Jude as the pain of his past cuts deep into his carefully constructed life.
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.Pub Date: March 10, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-385-53925-8
Page Count: 720
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Dec. 21, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
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