Where the classic Radetsky March could woo any reader with its breadth, insight and humor, this novel offers a sentimental...
Sympathy for characters vies with purplish prose and blaring symbols in this reimagining of Napoleon’s brief resurgence after his first exile.
Roth (Joseph Roth: A Life in Letters, 2012, etc.) focuses on the period (actually 111 days) between Napoleon’s triumphant return to Paris from banishment on Elba and his defeat at Waterloo, imagining a great man moving toward his downfall. In this slim historical novel, the author dwells on the Corsican’s solitude, ambitions and shifting emotions in two sections, while two others concern a palace laundress named Angelina, also Corsican, who is infatuated with the emperor and whose aunt tells fortunes for the great man. Napoleon has an encounter with the washerwoman that leads to an almost-tryst, as well as two brushes with her son, a drummer boy in the army. The second of these, on his final battlefield, is, like many of the book’s stronger scenes, damp with bathos. Angelina briefly interrupts her adoration of the man, “so great that everything in the world was his,” to dally with the “world of sabres, spurs, boots and woven braid” in the person of “the magnificent Sergeant-Major Sosthene,” a comic giant and the drummer boy’s dad. She will also find refuge during the Elba days in the bed of a kind Polish cobbler with a wooden leg. Aside from reviewing his troops, studying his maps and visiting his mom, Napoleon does little until his coach ride to Belgium and flight to the Atlantic and his last jailers, the British. Roth dwells at length on his solitude and his consciousness of time running short. Ticking clocks and trickling sand in “an hourglass of polished beryl” are less than subtle reminders of “his enemy, Time.”
Where the classic Radetsky March could woo any reader with its breadth, insight and humor, this novel offers a sentimental miniaturist painting soppy little scenes that maybe only a Roth completist will appreciate.Pub Date: Oct. 7, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-8112-2278-5
Page Count: 224
Publisher: New Directions
Review Posted Online: July 1, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2014
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
A deeply satisfying novel, both sensuously vivid and remarkably poignant.
Norwegian novelist Jacobsen folds a quietly powerful coming-of-age story into a rendition of daily life on one of Norway’s rural islands a hundred years ago in a novel that was shortlisted for the 2017 Man Booker International Prize.
Ingrid Barrøy, her father, Hans, mother, Maria, grandfather Martin, and slightly addled aunt Barbro are the owners and sole inhabitants of Barrøy Island, one of numerous small family-owned islands in an area of Norway barely touched by the outside world. The novel follows Ingrid from age 3 through a carefree early childhood of endless small chores, simple pleasures, and unquestioned familial love into her more ambivalent adolescence attending school off the island and becoming aware of the outside world, then finally into young womanhood when she must make difficult choices. Readers will share Ingrid’s adoration of her father, whose sense of responsibility conflicts with his romantic nature. He adores Maria, despite what he calls her “la-di-da” ways, and is devoted to Ingrid. Twice he finds work on the mainland for his sister, Barbro, but, afraid she’ll be unhappy, he brings her home both times. Rooted to the land where he farms and tied to the sea where he fishes, Hans struggles to maintain his family’s hardscrabble existence on an island where every repair is a struggle against the elements. But his efforts are Sisyphean. Life as a Barrøy on Barrøy remains precarious. Changes do occur in men’s and women’s roles, reflected in part by who gets a literal chair to sit on at meals, while world crises—a war, Sweden’s financial troubles—have unexpected impact. Yet the drama here occurs in small increments, season by season, following nature’s rhythm through deaths and births, moments of joy and deep sorrow. The translator’s decision to use roughly translated phrases in conversation—i.e., “Tha’s goen’ nohvar” for "You’re going nowhere")—slows the reading down at first but ends up drawing readers more deeply into the world of Barrøy and its prickly, intensely alive inhabitants.
A deeply satisfying novel, both sensuously vivid and remarkably poignant.Pub Date: April 7, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-77196-319-0
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Biblioasis
Review Posted Online: Jan. 12, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2020
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