Addictive, elegiac, and pristinely paced.
A diary-keeping museum curator builds a relic of words for his dead lover.
Having spent a solitary New Year’s Eve alone watching a film in which his former lover Imogen starred, David—a middle-aged man who’s “happier living in the past”—begins a diary into which he pours a lyrical disorder of fragments: He describes Imogen’s often risqué, avant-garde films; he meditates on the Catholic veneration of saints and relics; he describes the financially ailing Sanderson-Perceval Museum, where the items on display—“the velvet mushrooms, the glass jellyfish,” the “excavated” remains of a stillborn child—“belonged together only because they had been collected”; he writes about Imogen’s long decline through illness to death; he charts the progress of a homeless man working to put his life back on track; and, collected alongside one another in David’s diary, these disparate writings slowly refract back to Imogen, adhering into something of a reliquary of words. Novels made of nonlinear fragments—see Jenny Offill’s Department of Speculation, Peter Rock’s The Night Swimmers, or David Markson’s Wittgenstein's Mistress—tend to self-consciously declare their form as their philosophy; Buckley’s (The River Is the River, 2015, etc.) latest novel is no exception. Through David, Buckley meditates on the unbridgeable gap between thoughts and expressions: “Words do not preserve the person; they are not held in a colorless medium of language.” Later the topic is the unbridgeable gap between memory and life: “When I think of Imogen, what presents itself to my mind is not a story….A story, a life, is something one makes; it is not what one remembers.” Readers who dislike artsy books told in nonlinear fragments will undoubtedly dislike this one; but for the rest of us, David’s diary is actually something of a triumph. It contains moments of astonishing lyricism: A museum’s objects “are like stars, small pieces of light from distances that cannot be bridged.” It contains moments of dark humor: Imogen (an actress, remember) “did not feel that she was an insecure person. On the contrary, she said, she was absolutely secure in the knowledge that there was no secure entity behind the name Imogen Gough.” And, ultimately, Buckley’s novel is both very entertaining and very sad—a book of high artifice that feels true.
Addictive, elegiac, and pristinely paced.Pub Date: Jan. 14, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-68137-395-9
Page Count: 304
Publisher: New York Review Books
Review Posted Online: Oct. 26, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2019
BOOK REVIEW
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
With frank language and patient plotting, this gangly teen crush grows into a confident adult love affair.
Eleven years ago, he broke her heart. But he doesn’t know why she never forgave him.
Toggling between past and present, two love stories unfold simultaneously. In the first, Macy Sorensen meets and falls in love with the boy next door, Elliot Petropoulos, in the closet of her dad’s vacation home, where they hide out to discuss their favorite books. In the second, Macy is working as a doctor and engaged to a single father, and she hasn’t spoken to Elliot since their breakup. But a chance encounter forces her to confront the truth: what happened to make Macy stop speaking to Elliot? Ultimately, they’re separated not by time or physical remoteness but by emotional distance—Elliot and Macy always kept their relationship casual because they went to different schools. And as a teen, Macy has more to worry about than which girl Elliot is taking to the prom. After losing her mother at a young age, Macy is navigating her teenage years without a female role model, relying on the time-stamped notes her mother left in her father’s care for guidance. In the present day, Macy’s father is dead as well. She throws herself into her work and rarely comes up for air, not even to plan her upcoming wedding. Since Macy is still living with her fiance while grappling with her feelings for Elliot, the flashbacks offer steamy moments, tender revelations, and sweetly awkward confessions while Macy makes peace with her past and decides her future.
With frank language and patient plotting, this gangly teen crush grows into a confident adult love affair.Pub Date: April 10, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-5011-2801-1
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Gallery Books/Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Jan. 22, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2018
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
