A moody, muted composition about art under the thumb of tyranny.
A fictional treatment of the Russian composer Dmitri Shostakovich (1906-1975) and his long history of humiliation and persecution under Soviet rule.
“Muddle instead of music,” read the headline in Pravda after the 1936 performance of Shostakovich’s opera Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk. Under Stalin’s rule, this signified more than just a bad review—it was a loudly broadcasted command to stick to the Communist Party line and, amid purges and gulags, tantamount to a death threat. This brief novel from the Man Booker Prize–winning Barnes (The Sense of an Ending, 2011, etc.) captures the cloud of fear the composer lived under until his death, regardless of whether he was in or out of favor with “Power” with a capital P. He delivered speeches he didn’t write that made claims he didn’t agree with, and he acceded to demands he allow a tutor to school him in Soviet doctrine, while laboring to compose music that wouldn’t offend but still indulged his creative spirit. All of this took a toll on him, of course, and Barnes captures his subject’s stress and dark humor with his signature grace. There's plenty of sharp imagery depicting Shostakovich’s bind: “He swam in honours like a shrimp in shrimp-cocktail sauce” captures the putrescence of acclaim that's a function of politics; elsewhere, he conceives of life as “the cat that dragged the parrot downstairs by its tail; his head banged against every step.” But this portrait also feels too restrained at times. While Barnes willingly gets into Shostakovich’s head when it comes to his painful submission, he generally elides how he composed music under those circumstances. That softens the sense of artistic loss in a story that might have sent a stronger signal about what happens to creativity in repressive circumstances.
A moody, muted composition about art under the thumb of tyranny.Pub Date: May 10, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-101-94724-1
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Feb. 10, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2016
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
This book sings with the terrible silence of dead civilizations in which once there was valor.
Written with quiet dignity that builds to a climax of tragic force, this book about the dissolution of an African tribe, its traditions, and values, represents a welcome departure from the familiar "Me, white brother" genre.
Written by a Nigerian African trained in missionary schools, this novel tells quietly the story of a brave man, Okonkwo, whose life has absolute validity in terms of his culture, and who exercises his prerogative as a warrior, father, and husband with unflinching single mindedness. But into the complex Nigerian village filters the teachings of strangers, teachings so alien to the tribe, that resistance is impossible. One must distinguish a force to be able to oppose it, and to most, the talk of Christian salvation is no more than the babbling of incoherent children. Still, with his guns and persistence, the white man, amoeba-like, gradually absorbs the native culture and in despair, Okonkwo, unable to withstand the corrosion of what he, alone, understands to be the life force of his people, hangs himself. In the formlessness of the dying culture, it is the missionary who takes note of the event, reminding himself to give Okonkwo's gesture a line or two in his work, The Pacification of the Primitive Tribes of the Lower Niger.
This book sings with the terrible silence of dead civilizations in which once there was valor.Pub Date: Jan. 23, 1958
ISBN: 0385474547
Page Count: 207
Publisher: McDowell, Obolensky
Review Posted Online: April 23, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1958
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