A novel that offers insight into the renowned author and his native land.
An early, epic novel by the late Nobel Prize winner, for completists steeped in knowledge of the author’s work and his native Portugal.
Though this novel won the City of Lisbon Prize upon publication in 1980 and has since been praised as both seminal stylistically and deeply personal, this translation represents its first publication in English, more than three decades later. And even fans of the fables and parables of Saramago (Blindness, 1998, etc.) will likely find the novel a mixed bag, with flashes of brilliance offset by stretches of tedium, amid oblique references to Portuguese politics and culture that brief footnotes can barely illuminate. The novel encompasses three generations of the agrarian peasant Mau Tempo family, treated little better than cattle by the landowners who employ them. “These men and women were born to work, like good to average livestock,” writes the author, whose own family origins were similar. At times, the narrative slips into first-person from different characters, at other times, it offers the perspective of an ant, and yet other times, the distinction between the ant’s view and a human’s might be obliterated. Similarly, the authorial presence is very much in evidence throughout, with a droll tone, though the lack of any progress over the course of decades and generations seems tragic. “[W]e’re so used to laughter turning into tears or a howl of rage so loud it could be heard in heaven, not that there is any heaven,” he writes, of a conspiratorial exploitation that finds the church and government in league with each other, supporting the status quo, exercising power over the powerless. Even the natural order can’t provide solace, since “nature displays remarkable callousness when creating her various creatures.” As in the American naturalism of Frank Norris and Stephen Crane more than a century ago, the characters are but cogs in a big, cold machine, born to die but supplying their own replacements before they do.
A novel that offers insight into the renowned author and his native land.Pub Date: Dec. 4, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-15-101325-8
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Review Posted Online: Sept. 24, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2012
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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