A muted and unhurried novel that insists on the validity of the imperfect present.
Award-winning Argentinian poet and novelist Consiglio explores the idea of destiny in the quotidian lives of four characters in Buenos Aires.
A taxidermist named Amer makes guacamole. Marina, a meteorologist, fights an infestation of ants in her kitchen and later takes her young son, Simón, to swimming lessons. Her husband, Karl, a German oboist, walks home from rehearsal, missing his eldest daughter back in Europe. In short chapters full of minute detail, we follow these characters' lives. Attempting to quit smoking, Amer joins a self-help group and falls for a young woman named Clara. Marina turns 40. She does not believe in coincidences and consults an I Ching app on her phone. Her husband struggles with the feeling that living in Buenos Aires has changed him. "Karl was someone else but also himself. This fact—so obscure that he found it hard to put into words—materialised in a blurry and seemingly unfounded sorrow which was hard to shake off." He buys his wife an orange vibrator for a birthday present and hides it, unwrapped, in their son's room. In a different book, the vibrator would be discovered there, occasioning a scene of some kind. But Consiglio is not interested in cause and effect but in the accretion of granular detail. The taxidermist applies the tiniest amount of vegetable oil to the glass eyes of a stuffed otter: "The smallest of details: two strokes to the right, two to the left. That was his secret: it gave a sparkle to the gaze." While this reporting of mundane action can leave the reader longing for a more traditional plot, the novel is interesting in the way it challenges that expectation, gesturing toward a broader truth. On her way home after a liaison, the adulterous Marina, moistening her lips in the mirror, "imagined that thousands of people—people crossing the city in taxis—were doing the same, exactly the same, at that very instant. To a point, she thought the harmony that brought them all together erased the very notion of individuality. Then, with her eyes still shut, she went a bit further still: she said to herself that she, with all her infidelity, neglect, secrets and guilt, was simply performing a cliché that humanity had repeated over and over again since the beginning of time."
A muted and unhurried novel that insists on the validity of the imperfect present.Pub Date: May 18, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-9993-6846-3
Page Count: 150
Publisher: Charco Press
Review Posted Online: March 2, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2021
A dramatic, vividly detailed reconstruction of a little-known aspect of the Vietnam War.
A young woman’s experience as a nurse in Vietnam casts a deep shadow over her life.
When we learn that the farewell party in the opening scene is for Frances “Frankie” McGrath’s older brother—“a golden boy, a wild child who could make the hardest heart soften”—who is leaving to serve in Vietnam in 1966, we feel pretty certain that poor Finley McGrath is marked for death. Still, it’s a surprise when the fateful doorbell rings less than 20 pages later. His death inspires his sister to enlist as an Army nurse, and this turn of events is just the beginning of a roller coaster of a plot that’s impressive and engrossing if at times a bit formulaic. Hannah renders the experiences of the young women who served in Vietnam in all-encompassing detail. The first half of the book, set in gore-drenched hospital wards, mildewed dorm rooms, and boozy officers’ clubs, is an exciting read, tracking the transformation of virginal, uptight Frankie into a crack surgical nurse and woman of the world. Her tensely platonic romance with a married surgeon ends when his broken, unbreathing body is airlifted out by helicopter; she throws her pent-up passion into a wild affair with a soldier who happens to be her dead brother’s best friend. In the second part of the book, after the war, Frankie seems to experience every possible bad break. A drawback of the story is that none of the secondary characters in her life are fully three-dimensional: Her dismissive, chauvinistic father and tight-lipped, pill-popping mother, her fellow nurses, and her various love interests are more plot devices than people. You’ll wish you could have gone to Vegas and placed a bet on the ending—while it’s against all the odds, you’ll see it coming from a mile away.
A dramatic, vividly detailed reconstruction of a little-known aspect of the Vietnam War.Pub Date: Feb. 6, 2024
ISBN: 9781250178633
Page Count: 480
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Nov. 4, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2023
PERSPECTIVES
BOOK TO SCREEN
SEEN & HEARD
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
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