The prolific and versatile Shepard (Batting Against Castro, 1996, etc.) offers in his intermittently enthralling fifth novel an empathetic fictionalized biography of the great German silent-film director F. W. Murnau (18881931). Born Friedrich Wilhelm Plumpe to a deeply bourgeois Westphalian family, Shepard's protagonist is first seen, in 1907, as a reluctant student of philology at Charolottenburg, where he meets the invincible and sophisticated Hans Ehrenbaum-Degele, a budding poet who will become Wilhelm's schoolmate, soulmate, and lover—and whose aestheticism will encourage the self-created ``Murnau'' (the name of a Bavarian resort the two visit) to pursue his interest in the theater. These early pages are superb: Shepard has so thoroughly mastered the idiom and feel of the period that we seem to be inside a young Thomas Mann novel. The narrative then proceeds both through flashback (showing Wilhelm's unhappy boyhood) and straight chronology, moving forward first to Murnau's apprenticeship at Max Reinhardt's theater school in Berlin, his disturbing intimacy with such decadent eminences as poet Else Lasker-Schuller and homosexual film actor Conrad Veidt. There are splendid accounts of Murnau's wartime service as a fighter pilot (during which he ``came to understand aviation as a new way of seeing'') and later of the preparations for and filming of his vampire movie Nosferatu (a memorable vision of ``The natural world operating under the shadow of the supernatural.'' But, alas, the story's second half unconvincingly telescopes the remainder of Murnau's (admittedly brief) career and life: the filming of Der Letzte Mann, distinguished by its use of a moving camera devised by his brilliant cinematographer Karl Freund; his star-crossed Tahitian collaboration (on Tabu) with documentary filmmaker Robert Flaherty; and his death following an auto accident. This should have been a terrific novel—and a longer one. Its images simply flicker by so quickly that its power to involve and move is frustratingly dissipated.
Pub Date: April 8, 1998
ISBN: 0-679-44667-2
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 1998
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
BOOK TO SCREEN
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.
A violent surfacing of adolescence (which has little in common with Tarkington's earlier, broadly comic, Seventeen) has a compulsive impact.
"Nobody big except me" is the dream world of Holden Caulfield and his first person story is down to the basic, drab English of the pre-collegiate. For Holden is now being bounced from fancy prep, and, after a vicious evening with hall- and roommates, heads for New York to try to keep his latest failure from his parents. He tries to have a wild evening (all he does is pay the check), is terrorized by the hotel elevator man and his on-call whore, has a date with a girl he likes—and hates, sees his 10 year old sister, Phoebe. He also visits a sympathetic English teacher after trying on a drunken session, and when he keeps his date with Phoebe, who turns up with her suitcase to join him on his flight, he heads home to a hospital siege. This is tender and true, and impossible, in its picture of the old hells of young boys, the lonesomeness and tentative attempts to be mature and secure, the awful block between youth and being grown-up, the fright and sickness that humans and their behavior cause the challenging, the dramatization of the big bang. It is a sorry little worm's view of the off-beat of adult pressure, of contemporary strictures and conformity, of sentiment….
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.Pub Date: June 15, 1951
ISBN: 0316769177
Page Count: -
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1951
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
APPRECIATIONS
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