An elegant foray into music and memory.
A musical mystery set against the backdrop of a nation shattered by war and loss.
How many piano sonatas did Ludwig van Beethoven write? A music student might be quick to say 32—but that disallows the possibility that there’s one hidden somewhere or one by Mozart or Haydn that no one has ever seen before. That’s the conceit that Morrow (The Forgers, 2014, etc.) spins with this sonically rich novel, in which a Czech woman, Otylie Bartošová, only steps ahead of the German invaders in 1939, divides her inheritance among family and friends—namely, an anonymous Classical-era score given to her by her father and now split up into three, rendering it essentially without value to the avaricious Nazis. On immigrating to America, Otylie loses sight and hope of the treasure—part of which resurfaces years later in contemporary New York, beguiling a musicologist named Meta Taverner, who “knew it was impossible she had stumbled on another Beethoven Werk ohne Opuszahl in deepest, darkest Queens” but presses on, having now found a new source of meaning in a life burdened with quiet tragedies. She goes to Prague, seeking clues. Morrow delights in local color, in the “home of the Golem and crazy Rudolf’s equally crazy alchemists, not to mention Kafka’s bug,” though he works in an intriguing counterintuition: who’s to say that the manuscript isn’t in Prague, Texas, or Prague, Nebraska? The story, which runs a touch too long, takes a conventional whodunit twist with the introduction of a competing musicologist who wants the glory (and money) for himself even as Meta hits walls that induce a crisis of confidence in her abilities—and therein lies something of a leitmotiv. Yet, with the help of a dogged journalist and other allies, Meta works her way toward a hard-won resolution. As she says, “Sometimes in life what’s broken can’t be put back together,” to which Otylie replies, “Or maybe it was never truly broken at all.”
An elegant foray into music and memory.Pub Date: Oct. 3, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-8021-2715-0
Page Count: 528
Publisher: Atlantic Monthly
Review Posted Online: July 3, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2017
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
Miller makes Homer pertinent to women facing 21st-century monsters.
A retelling of ancient Greek lore gives exhilarating voice to a witch.
“Monsters are a boon for gods. Imagine all the prayers.” So says Circe, a sly, petulant, and finally commanding voice that narrates the entirety of Miller’s dazzling second novel. The writer returns to Homer, the wellspring that led her to an Orange Prize for The Song of Achilles (2012). This time, she dips into The Odyssey for the legend of Circe, a nymph who turns Odysseus’ crew of men into pigs. The novel, with its distinctive feminist tang, starts with the sentence: “When I was born, the name for what I was did not exist.” Readers will relish following the puzzle of this unpromising daughter of the sun god Helios and his wife, Perse, who had negligible use for their child. It takes banishment to the island Aeaea for Circe to sense her calling as a sorceress: “I will not be like a bird bred in a cage, I thought, too dull to fly even when the door stands open. I stepped into those woods and my life began.” This lonely, scorned figure learns herbs and potions, surrounds herself with lions, and, in a heart-stopping chapter, outwits the monster Scylla to propel Daedalus and his boat to safety. She makes lovers of Hermes and then two mortal men. She midwifes the birth of the Minotaur on Crete and performs her own C-section. And as she grows in power, she muses that “not even Odysseus could talk his way past [her] witchcraft. He had talked his way past the witch instead.” Circe’s fascination with mortals becomes the book’s marrow and delivers its thrilling ending. All the while, the supernatural sits intriguingly alongside “the tonic of ordinary things.” A few passages coil toward melodrama, and one inelegant line after a rape seems jarringly modern, but the spell holds fast. Expect Miller’s readership to mushroom like one of Circe’s spells.
Miller makes Homer pertinent to women facing 21st-century monsters.Pub Date: April 10, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-316-55634-7
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Jan. 22, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2018
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