The historical context will be unfamiliar to most readers, but the issues, of good and evil, identity and fate, are...
A historical novel set in 1850 depicts a year in Bosnia under the rule of a despotic general and his occupying army, along with his obsequious and devious court.
The politically active Andric (The Days of the Consuls, 1992, etc.) won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1961, the only laureate from what was then Yugoslavia. This historical novel was his final book before he died in 1975, and this is its first English translation. The grim narrative leaves little room for light and none for humor, as it describes Bosnia during this volatile year as “on the surface, rebellion, violence and fear, and beneath it age-old poverty, the meager existence of the small man and the quiet, unstoppable decay of institutions and families, of everything that had been or was held to be reputable, powerful and rich.” Into this breach, the occupying forces brought a moral cesspool and insidious gossip, while Omer Pasha Latas ruled from an inscrutable, imperious remove, as if he were above it all. For he has his own secrets and identity issues, as a Serbian Christian refugee from Bosnia (born Mihailo Latas) who had converted to Islam and established himself as a ruthless leader within the Ottoman Empire under the sultan in Istanbul. His identity, beliefs, and allegiances all have a certain malleability, as he returns to Bosnia not in the spirit of homecoming but as an outside enforcer, determined to quell any rebellion in the land where he once lived. Amid the portrayals of various members of the court, the novel’s centerpiece finds the protagonist sitting for a commissioned portrait and shows how his relationship with the painter changes both of them. The plot pivots on a senseless crime of passion, a surprising yet fitting denouement within a court marked by what one character calls “killing and lechery! Because everything in this house is infected with foul, profane lechery...and lechery kills, it must kill, for it’s the same as death, unnatural, shameful death.”
The historical context will be unfamiliar to most readers, but the issues, of good and evil, identity and fate, are universal.Pub Date: Sept. 18, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-68137-252-5
Page Count: 288
Publisher: New York Review Books
Review Posted Online: July 1, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2018
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
Doerr captures the sights and sounds of wartime and focuses, refreshingly, on the innate goodness of his major characters.
Doerr presents us with two intricate stories, both of which take place during World War II; late in the novel, inevitably, they intersect.
In August 1944, Marie-Laure LeBlanc is a blind 16-year-old living in the walled port city of Saint-Malo in Brittany and hoping to escape the effects of Allied bombing. D-Day took place two months earlier, and Cherbourg, Caen and Rennes have already been liberated. She’s taken refuge in this city with her great-uncle Etienne, at first a fairly frightening figure to her. Marie-Laure’s father was a locksmith and craftsman who made scale models of cities that Marie-Laure studied so she could travel around on her own. He also crafted clever and intricate boxes, within which treasures could be hidden. Parallel to the story of Marie-Laure we meet Werner and Jutta Pfennig, a brother and sister, both orphans who have been raised in the Children’s House outside Essen, in Germany. Through flashbacks we learn that Werner had been a curious and bright child who developed an obsession with radio transmitters and receivers, both in their infancies during this period. Eventually, Werner goes to a select technical school and then, at 18, into the Wehrmacht, where his technical aptitudes are recognized and he’s put on a team trying to track down illegal radio transmissions. Etienne and Marie-Laure are responsible for some of these transmissions, but Werner is intrigued since what she’s broadcasting is innocent—she shares her passion for Jules Verne by reading aloud 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea. A further subplot involves Marie-Laure’s father’s having hidden a valuable diamond, one being tracked down by Reinhold von Rumpel, a relentless German sergeant-major.
Doerr captures the sights and sounds of wartime and focuses, refreshingly, on the innate goodness of his major characters.Pub Date: May 6, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-4767-4658-6
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: March 5, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2014
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
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