A head-swirling kaleidoscope that, though fictional, is never for a moment fictitious.
The czar is dead. Long live—well, the Stalinist successors of the czar and his court, as proficient as their predecessors at feathering their nests.
“I thought all bloodstains were washed away in Russia”: so, on finding the contrary, marvels Malaparte (The Bird That Swallowed Its Cage: The Selected Writings of Curzio Malaparte, 2012), the German/Italian writer who had the dubious distinction of being on the enemies lists of Mussolini, Hitler, and Stalin alike. Malaparte may just be the original postmodernist, at least as far as genre-crossing is concerned: his journalism reads like fiction, and his fiction like journalism, and no cataloger can ever be quite sure of where to shelve books such as his best-known work, Kaputt (1944). So it is with this book, which he prefaces with the remark that “in this novel…everything is true: the people, the events, the things, the places.” Why a novel, then? Well, Malaparte has been dead since 1957, so it must remain a mystery, except to hazard that just as Kenneth Rexroth called his true An Autobiographical Novel such to get the lawyers off his back, Malaparte may have been hoping to lessen the wrath of the Politburo. He needn’t have tried, for from the opening page there’s plenty here to sustain the ire of an apparatchik. Malaparte begins by lampooning the “communist nobility,” a demimonde of high-heel–clad actresses and vodka-guzzling cultural commissars. Within a few dozen pages he has evolved into a political philosopher, noting—and worth considering for our own time—that the downtrodden masses will support tyrants beyond all reason, albeit “the torment that oppresses the masses in a revolution is their obsession with betrayal.” Others who appear here have different obsessions, among them the quietly subversive novelist Mikhail Bulgakov, who tells Malaparte, “I am afraid of Christ,” even as Malaparte later reckons that the greatest sin of the proletarian poet Vladimir Mayakovsky was that “Mayakovsky believed in God.”
A head-swirling kaleidoscope that, though fictional, is never for a moment fictitious.Pub Date: March 13, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-68137-209-9
Page Count: 256
Publisher: New York Review Books
Review Posted Online: Dec. 6, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2018
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 writing is merely serviceable, and one can’t help but wish the author had found a way to present her material as...
An unlikely love story set amid the horrors of a Nazi death camp.
Based on real people and events, this debut novel follows Lale Sokolov, a young Slovakian Jew sent to Auschwitz in 1942. There, he assumes the heinous task of tattooing incoming Jewish prisoners with the dehumanizing numbers their SS captors use to identify them. When the Tätowierer, as he is called, meets fellow prisoner Gita Furman, 17, he is immediately smitten. Eventually, the attraction becomes mutual. Lale proves himself an operator, at once cagey and courageous: As the Tätowierer, he is granted special privileges and manages to smuggle food to starving prisoners. Through female prisoners who catalog the belongings confiscated from fellow inmates, Lale gains access to jewels, which he trades to a pair of local villagers for chocolate, medicine, and other items. Meanwhile, despite overwhelming odds, Lale and Gita are able to meet privately from time to time and become lovers. In 1944, just ahead of the arrival of Russian troops, Lale and Gita separately leave the concentration camp and experience harrowingly close calls. Suffice it to say they both survive. To her credit, the author doesn’t flinch from describing the depravity of the SS in Auschwitz and the unimaginable suffering of their victims—no gauzy evasions here, as in Boy in the Striped Pajamas. She also manages to raise, if not really explore, some trickier issues—the guilt of those Jews, like the tattooist, who survived by doing the Nazis’ bidding, in a sense betraying their fellow Jews; and the complicity of those non-Jews, like the Slovaks in Lale’s hometown, who failed to come to the aid of their beleaguered countrymen.
The writing is merely serviceable, and one can’t help but wish the author had found a way to present her material as nonfiction. Still, this is a powerful, gut-wrenching tale that is hard to shake off.Pub Date: Sept. 4, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-06-279715-5
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: July 16, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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