Pensive and ponderous: a work of continental gloom that promises that no one gets out of here alive.
An elderly artist meets an elderly dandy in the late Croatian writer Drndić’s (EEG, 2019, etc.) brief but potent novel, and the rest is history‚ with all its inevitable tragedy.
Born in time to witness some of the worst episodes of the 20th century, Artur and Isabella are very different people, he “the greatest wearer of hats in this country,” she a quiet photographer who fled her native Germany decades earlier. They meet on a New Year’s Eve, and after a few hours together, they depart this life, statistics for a police ledger. All that is by way of prelude to Drndić’s larger story, centering on a melancholic fellow, aging but not elderly, named Pupi, who has an unusual attachment to the rhinos at the city zoo, “wild beasts, heavy beasts.” Pupi doesn’t much like the name he bears—he thinks of himself, Drndić writes, by his formal name, Printz, —and he doesn’t much like the life he is living, caring for an elderly father, nursing a variety of complaints, and collecting an odd assortment of facts for his notebook: The year of his birth, 1946, was, he calculates, also one in which numerous Nazis met their deaths: “Joachim von Ribbentrop, German war criminal, hung; Hans Frank, German war criminal, hung; Julius Streicher, German leader, hung; Wilhelm Keitel, German field-marshal, hung.“ Printz has odd little habits besides his obsessive collecting of facts, including pilfering things like food and bottles of wine from trade shows while excusing himself by noting that the French philosopher Louis Althusser did the same thing. Of course, Althusser also killed his wife, though Printz excuses him with the thought that “he helped her to kill herself because she wanted to kill herself.” That slender thread joins Isabella’s story to Printz’s, which ends as it began, in the company of rhinos—which is not necessarily a good thing.
Pensive and ponderous: a work of continental gloom that promises that no one gets out of here alive.Pub Date: Sept. 24, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-8112-2891-6
Page Count: 160
Publisher: New Directions
Review Posted Online: June 30, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2019
Suspenseful, full of incident, and not obviously necessary.
Atwood goes back to Gilead.
The Handmaid’s Tale (1985), consistently regarded as a masterpiece of 20th-century literature, has gained new attention in recent years with the success of the Hulu series as well as fresh appreciation from readers who feel like this story has new relevance in America’s current political climate. Atwood herself has spoken about how news headlines have made her dystopian fiction seem eerily plausible, and it’s not difficult to imagine her wanting to revisit Gilead as the TV show has sped past where her narrative ended. Like the novel that preceded it, this sequel is presented as found documents—first-person accounts of life inside a misogynistic theocracy from three informants. There is Agnes Jemima, a girl who rejects the marriage her family arranges for her but still has faith in God and Gilead. There’s Daisy, who learns on her 16th birthday that her whole life has been a lie. And there's Aunt Lydia, the woman responsible for turning women into Handmaids. This approach gives readers insight into different aspects of life inside and outside Gilead, but it also leads to a book that sometimes feels overstuffed. The Handmaid’s Tale combined exquisite lyricism with a powerful sense of urgency, as if a thoughtful, perceptive woman was racing against time to give witness to her experience. That narrator hinted at more than she said; Atwood seemed to trust readers to fill in the gaps. This dynamic created an atmosphere of intimacy. However curious we might be about Gilead and the resistance operating outside that country, what we learn here is that what Atwood left unsaid in the first novel generated more horror and outrage than explicit detail can. And the more we get to know Agnes, Daisy, and Aunt Lydia, the less convincing they become. It’s hard, of course, to compete with a beloved classic, so maybe the best way to read this new book is to forget about The Handmaid’s Tale and enjoy it as an artful feminist thriller.
Suspenseful, full of incident, and not obviously necessary.Pub Date: Sept. 10, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-385-54378-1
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Nan A. Talese
Review Posted Online: Sept. 3, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2019
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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
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