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
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
Tinny perhaps, but still a minutely rendered and impressively steady feminist vision of apocalypse.
The time is the not-so-distant future, when the US's spiraling social freedoms have finally called down a reaction, an Iranian-style repressive "monotheocracy" calling itself the Republic of Gilead—a Bible-thumping, racist, capital-punishing, and misogynistic rule that would do away with pleasure altogether were it not for one thing: that the Gileadan women, pure and true (as opposed to all the nonbelieving women, those who've ever been adulterous or married more than once), are found rarely fertile.
Thus are drafted a whole class of "handmaids," whose function is to bear the children of the elite, to be fecund or else (else being certain death, sent out to be toxic-waste removers on outlying islands). The narrative frame for Atwood's dystopian vision is the hopeless private testimony of one of these surrogate mothers, Offred ("of" plus the name of her male protector). Lying cradled by the body of the barren wife, being meanwhile serviced by the husband, Offred's "ceremony" must be successful—if she does not want to join the ranks of the other disappeared (which include her mother, her husband—dead—and small daughter, all taken away during the years of revolt). One Of her only human conduits is a gradually developing affair with her master's chauffeur—something that's balanced more than offset, though, by the master's hypocritically un-Puritan use of her as a kind of B-girl at private parties held by the ruling men in a spirit of nostalgia and lust. This latter relationship, edging into real need (the master's), is very effectively done; it highlights the handmaid's (read Everywoman's) eternal exploitation, profane or sacred ("We are two-legged wombs, that's all: sacred vessels, ambulatory chalices"). Atwood, to her credit, creates a chillingly specific, imaginable night-mare. The book is short on characterization—this is Atwood, never a warm writer, at her steeliest—and long on cynicism—it's got none of the human credibility of a work such as Walker Percy's Love In The Ruins. But the scariness is visceral, a world that's like a dangerous and even fatal grid, an electrified fence.
Tinny perhaps, but still a minutely rendered and impressively steady feminist vision of apocalypse.Pub Date: Feb. 17, 1985
ISBN: 038549081X
Page Count: -
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
Review Posted Online: Sept. 16, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 1985
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
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