Szalay has devised an ingenious way to accommodate enormous range in a miniature form. Subtle, smart—a triumph.
The slender new novel from Szalay—whose most recent book, All That Man Is, was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize in 2016—is a (world) tour de force, an exploration in fiction of the concept of six degrees of separation.
The novel's most direct literary model is probably Arthur Schnitzler's fin-de-siècle Vienna play La Ronde, an erotic round made up of 10 dialogues between lovers whose liaisons cross boundaries of marriage and status, with the daisy chain making its way back around to where it started. Szalay's book consists of a dozen brief, plainspoken, deceptively simple sketches, glimpses. He begins with a flight from London to Madrid, with an elderly woman on the way home from tending her cancer-stricken middle-aged son. After an incident of turbulence, she confides in a small way to her seatmate, who has spilled a soft drink on himself. He continues on from Madrid to his home in Dakar, where tragic news awaits. And so on—flight by flight, chapter by chapter, character by character, the novel circumnavigates the globe: Sao Paulo, Toronto, Saigon, Doha, Budapest...until, inevitably, we link back to London and the cancer patient with whom we began. Along the way, Szalay grants brief, poignant glimpses into a wide variety of people and circumstances: a freight pilot whose taxicab to the airport hits a pedestrian, an expatriate gardener with a secret, a melancholy oncologist and his brother the chancer, a globe-trotting journalist, an Indian city-dweller and her abused rural sister. The chapters are tiny cross sections of lives, lovingly examined under the writer's microscope. The result is a book that is high concept but—thanks to Szalay's gift for compression and the same empathetic imagination that was on display in All That Man Is—never gimmicky.
Szalay has devised an ingenious way to accommodate enormous range in a miniature form. Subtle, smart—a triumph.Pub Date: July 16, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-9821-2273-7
Page Count: 160
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: April 27, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2019
PROFILES
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
A tour de force.
In 1974, a troubled Vietnam vet inherits a house from a fallen comrade and moves his family to Alaska.
After years as a prisoner of war, Ernt Allbright returned home to his wife, Cora, and daughter, Leni, a violent, difficult, restless man. The family moved so frequently that 13-year-old Leni went to five schools in four years. But when they move to Alaska, still very wild and sparsely populated, Ernt finds a landscape as raw as he is. As Leni soon realizes, “Everyone up here had two stories: the life before and the life now. If you wanted to pray to a weirdo god or live in a school bus or marry a goose, no one in Alaska was going to say crap to you.” There are many great things about this book—one of them is its constant stream of memorably formulated insights about Alaska. Another key example is delivered by Large Marge, a former prosecutor in Washington, D.C., who now runs the general store for the community of around 30 brave souls who live in Kaneq year-round. As she cautions the Allbrights, “Alaska herself can be Sleeping Beauty one minute and a bitch with a sawed-off shotgun the next. There’s a saying: Up here you can make one mistake. The second one will kill you.” Hannah’s (The Nightingale, 2015, etc.) follow-up to her series of blockbuster bestsellers will thrill her fans with its combination of Greek tragedy, Romeo and Juliet–like coming-of-age story, and domestic potboiler. She re-creates in magical detail the lives of Alaska's homesteaders in both of the state's seasons (they really only have two) and is just as specific and authentic in her depiction of the spiritual wounds of post-Vietnam America.
A tour de force.Pub Date: Feb. 6, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-312-57723-0
Page Count: 448
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Oct. 30, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2017
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