Too many mysteries pile up to sustain suspense, but the novel is redeemed by its bright shimmer of magic realism.
The Angolan writer’s fifth novel to receive an English translation, a look at the upheaval caused by the Angolan civil war, places a recluse at its heart.
Who is this solitary young woman on the top floor of a luxury building in Luanda, Angola’s capital, and why has she walled off her apartment? Her name is Ludo. She has been brought here unwillingly from Portugal by her sister, Odete, and brother-in-law, Orlando, an Angolan engineer for a diamond company, only to have the couple vanish into thin air, leaving behind a cache of diamonds. A burglar comes looking for the stones. Fragile but resourceful, Ludo shoots him dead, buries him in a terrace flowerbed and throws up the wall, prompted by her agoraphobia and a traumatic experience in late childhood; below, the crowds are celebrating the ex-colony’s 1975 independence, which will lead to the civil war. Ludo will live alone for 30-plus years, finally accepting Angola as her home and not the land of black savages she had long thought. Her brooding presence is inescapable, though she’s not the linchpin Agualusa evidently intended; there are many other characters whose stories crisscross as war and politics shape their lives. Keep your eye on Little Chief. He’s an altruistic political activist and an ex-con. Down on his luck, he shoots a pigeon, the same pigeon that had earlier swallowed some diamonds on Ludo’s terrace. Those diamonds and shrewd investments will make him a rich man and Ludo’s neighbor. Reversals of fortune are the novel’s lifeblood, along with strange disappearances and delayed revelations. A whole village disappears (witchcraft at work?); Odete and Orlando’s disappearance is only explained at the end.
Too many mysteries pile up to sustain suspense, but the novel is redeemed by its bright shimmer of magic realism.Pub Date: Dec. 15, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-914671-31-2
Page Count: 250
Publisher: Archipelago
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
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
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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