It's been said that memory is a poet—if so, this novel represents some of its most gorgeous and incandescent work.
The son of one of Argentina’s thousands of dissidents who vanished and were presumed murdered during the so-called Dirty War uses his fertile memory to bring his lost mother back to life.
The “disappeared”—those deemed left-wing enemies of the vicious military dictatorship that ruled Argentina during the 1970s and early '80s—still haunt the country’s collective memory, especially the surviving family members who don’t know what happened to their absent loved ones. This first novel by López, a poet, actor, and director of the literary group Ciclo Carne Argentina, paints an intensely evocative portrait of one such missing person: a woman whose name is one of the few things her son doesn’t disclose about her from the memories he carries from childhood. As the book’s title implies, it is her physical magnetism that the son most wishes to convey from the beginning: “Her skin was pale and opaque; I could almost say it was bluish, and it had a luster that made it unique, of a natural aristocracy, removed from trivialities.” She was, clearly, a single mother, though it isn’t altogether clear how or why she became single. The son, who likewise isn’t named, doesn’t know much about who and where his father is (though in a dream, he thinks he sees his red hair passing by one Christmas Eve). Otherwise it’s just him and his “beautiful young” mother who do everything together—except at those times when she leaves him with their neighbor and heads off “with a worried expression on her face” for whole evenings. Where she goes and what she does isn’t specified, because the little boy knows nothing except the pleasure he gets whenever they go to the movies or when she allows him to have some candy (which she otherwise forbids) after a bomb scare interrupts his school play. The sweet details of the intimate times between mother and son are delicately woven with shadows of impending menace that, as they're viewed from a child’s perspective, are at best vaguely defined beyond his mother’s odd silences and occasional tearful outbursts. Still, both he and we are kept in the dark as to the nature of her unease, and even the day when the boy’s life changes forever reveals little except physical and emotional ruin. The process of recovering from that ruin, one suspects, culminates with this heartbreaking and moving reverie.
It's been said that memory is a poet—if so, this novel represents some of its most gorgeous and incandescent work.Pub Date: Nov. 14, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-61219-681-7
Page Count: 160
Publisher: Melville House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 17, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2017
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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