Beautifully constructed and very rich but, still, tales with a narrow focus that may seem foreign and strange to the...
Seventeen stories, most portraying historical figures trapped in the political convulsions of the 1930s and ’40s, by award-winning Spanish novelist Muñoz Molina.
Muñoz Molina writes with a kind of political nostalgia, recalling the great conflicts between Communists and Fascists and the various factions caught in between during WWII and the years leading up to it. His style is leisurely and anecdotal, somewhat in the manner of Borges, and it nearly always takes the form of personal recollections of events seen now across the expanse of many years. Some of the stories, like “Sacristan” (a provincial Spaniard who moved to Madrid many years ago continues to return to his native village for Holy Week and observes the changes brought on with the passing of time), are simple elegies, but most are rooted in actual events and some are populated by historical figures. “Munzenburg,” for example, depicts the real-life adventures of Willi Munzenburg, a German Communist spy who ended up being pursued by the Gestapo and the KGB alike during the early days of WWII. “Silencing Everything” gives us the recollections of a Spanish university student who, too young to fight in the Spanish Civil War, made his way to Russia a few years later to fight the Germans in WWII, while “Those Who Wait” recounts the stomach-churning tension suffered by those who tried to go on with their daily lives while trying to evade arrest by the Soviet or Nazi secret police (Jews such as Victor Klemperer of Dresden, or hapless Communist Party rejects like Margarete Buber-Neumann or Nadezhda Mandelstam). The title piece is a rambling memoir that moves from the author’s recollections of the abandoned Jewish ghetto in his native Spanish town to a visit many years later to the Sephardic cemetery in Manhattan.
Beautifully constructed and very rich but, still, tales with a narrow focus that may seem foreign and strange to the majority of American readers.Pub Date: Dec. 1, 2003
ISBN: 0-15-100901-5
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Harcourt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2003
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
Jonathan Livingston Kitty, it’s not.
A lonely postman learns that he’s about to die—and reflects on life as he bargains with a Hawaiian-shirt–wearing devil.
The 30-year-old first-person narrator in filmmaker/novelist Kawamura’s slim novel is, by his own admission, “boring…a monotone guy,” so unimaginative that, when he learns he has a brain tumor, the bucket list he writes down is dull enough that “even the cat looked disgusted with me.” Luckily—or maybe not—a friendly devil, dubbed Aloha, pops onto the scene, and he’s willing to make a deal: an extra day of life in exchange for being allowed to remove something pleasant from the world. The first thing excised is phones, which goes well enough. (The narrator is pleasantly surprised to find that “people seemed to have no problem finding something to fill up their free time.”) But deals with the devil do have a way of getting complicated. This leads to shallow musings (“Sometimes, when you rewatch a film after not having seen it for a long time, it makes a totally different impression on you than it did the first time you saw it. Of course, the movie hasn’t changed; it’s you who’s changed") written in prose so awkward, it’s possibly satire (“Tears dripped down onto the letter like warm, salty drops of rain”). Even the postman’s beloved cat, who gains the power of speech, ends up being prim and annoying. The narrator ponders feelings about a lost love, his late mother, and his estranged father in a way that some readers might find moving at times. But for many, whatever made this book a bestseller in Japan is going to be lost in translation.
Jonathan Livingston Kitty, it’s not.Pub Date: March 12, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-250-29405-0
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Flatiron Books
Review Posted Online: Feb. 16, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2019
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