A worthy subject treated with plodding artificiality.
Algerian writer Sansal makes his English-language debut with a novel about brothers who learn their father was a war criminal.
Malrich and Rachel Schiller were born in rural Algeria and raised by an uncle in an increasingly dangerous (and, lately, Islamic-fundamentalist) ghetto in Paris. Rachel, the elder, is the good boy, stable and industrious; Malrich is unmoored, alienated and angry. In 1994, their Algerian mother and German father are killed in a massacre in the village of Aín Deb. Troubled by the fact that his parents are listed under false names in the roster of the dead, Rachel investigates and discovers that his father was an SS officer who worked in Auschwitz and Buchenwald. Devastated by this revelation, he withdraws, loses his job and cuts his ties with loved ones. He devotes himself to an exhaustive study of his father’s sins and to meditation on guilt and penitence. After a visit to Auschwitz, he goes into seclusion, wastes away dressed in the striped trousers worn by camp inmates and eventually gasses himself to death in April 1996 (a culmination revealed in the novel’s opening sentence). The struggling Malrich is left to cope with both his father’s legacy and the havoc it wrought on his brother. Sansal daringly suggests an analogy between radical Islam and Nazism (which may be why the book was banned in his homeland), and his accounts of war-torn, ideologically riven Algeria and the grim ghettoes of Paris are powerful and heartfelt. Regrettably, the novel, told mainly through excerpts from the brothers’ diaries, doesn’t cohere. The musings on moral philosophy can be moving, but Rachel and Malrich ultimately seem less like people than containers for the abstract ideas Sansal wants to explore.
A worthy subject treated with plodding artificiality.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2009
ISBN: 978-1-933372-92-1
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Europa Editions
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2009
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
An illuminating read for anyone interested in the inner workings of the Catholic Church; for prelate-fiction superfans, it...
Harris, creator of grand, symphonic thrillers from Fatherland (1992) to An Officer and a Spy (2014), scores with a chamber piece of a novel set in the Vatican in the days after a fictional pope dies.
Fictional, yes, but the nameless pontiff has a lot in common with our own Francis: he’s famously humble, shunning the lavish Apostolic Palace for a small apartment, and he is committed to leading a church that engages with the world and its problems. In the aftermath of his sudden death, rumors circulate about the pope’s intention to fire certain cardinals. At the center of the action is Cardinal Lomeli, Dean of the College of Cardinals, whose job it is to manage the conclave that will elect a new pope. He believes it is also his duty to uncover what the pope knew before he died because some of the cardinals in question are in the running to succeed him. “In the running” is an apt phrase because, as described by Harris, the papal conclave is the ultimate political backroom—albeit a room, the Sistine Chapel, covered with Michelangelo frescoes. Vying for the papal crown are an African cardinal whom many want to see as the first black pope, a press-savvy Canadian, an Italian arch-conservative (think Cardinal Scalia), and an Italian liberal who wants to continue the late pope’s campaign to modernize the church. The novel glories in the ancient rituals that constitute the election process while still grounding that process in the real world: the Sistine Chapel is fitted with jamming devices to thwart electronic eavesdropping, and the pressure to act quickly is increased because “rumours that the pope is dead are already trending on social media.”
An illuminating read for anyone interested in the inner workings of the Catholic Church; for prelate-fiction superfans, it is pure temptation.Pub Date: Nov. 22, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-451-49344-6
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Sept. 6, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2016
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