Goldstone keeps his 16th-century themes—murder, religious fanaticism, espionage and court intrigue—moving at a 21st-century...
The “astronomer” of the title refers to Copernicus, and this novel of intrigue centers on the controversy about his heliocentric theory, especially as that controversy spills over into violent conflict between Catholics and Lutherans.
At the center of the story is Amaury de Faverges, the exquisitely educated but illegitimate son of the Duke of Savoy. Amaury is an expert on modern science—16th-century modern science that is, for the novel takes place in 1534. Dressed as a Franciscan, a classmate of Amaury’s is murdered on the streets of Paris for a packet of letters he was carrying, and the perpetrators turn out to be radical Lutherans who want to upset the Catholic status quo in France. Ory, aka The Inquisitor, promises that Amaury will achieve legitimacy if he agrees to help the Inquisition, and so begins an undercover assignment to the politically liberal court of Marguerite of Navarre, the older sister of France’s ruling monarch, François I. At Marguerite’s court Amaury gets a bit more than he bargained for, including a passionate dalliance with his former lover Hélène, one of the most beautiful women in France. Amaury begins to question both his mission and his religious upbringing when he realizes, perhaps naively, that his quest—to uncover documents that support Copernicus’s theory—might in fact lead science to “couple with love of God and lead the way to a new world. This discovery will save Christianity, not destroy it.” Amaury abhors the fanaticism of the Inquisition and is an enlightened man of the age. In creating his 16th-century tapestry, Goldstone (The Friar and the Cipher, 2005, etc.) weaves in actual historical figures, not just French royalty but also Rabelais (as earthy and witty as one would expect), John Calvin (severe) and, eventually, Copernicus, whose life is endangered as a result of his “heretical” theories.
Goldstone keeps his 16th-century themes—murder, religious fanaticism, espionage and court intrigue—moving at a 21st-century pace.Pub Date: May 1, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-8027-1986-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Walker
Review Posted Online: Dec. 23, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2010
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
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.
Four men who meet as college roommates move to New York and spend the next three decades gaining renown in their professions—as an architect, painter, actor and lawyer—and struggling with demons in their intertwined personal lives.
Yanagihara (The People in the Trees, 2013) takes the still-bold leap of writing about characters who don’t share her background; in addition to being male, JB is African-American, Malcolm has a black father and white mother, Willem is white, and “Jude’s race was undetermined”—deserted at birth, he was raised in a monastery and had an unspeakably traumatic childhood that’s revealed slowly over the course of the book. Two of them are gay, one straight and one bisexual. There isn’t a single significant female character, and for a long novel, there isn’t much plot. There aren’t even many markers of what’s happening in the outside world; Jude moves to a loft in SoHo as a young man, but we don’t see the neighborhood change from gritty artists’ enclave to glitzy tourist destination. What we get instead is an intensely interior look at the friends’ psyches and relationships, and it’s utterly enthralling. The four men think about work and creativity and success and failure; they cook for each other, compete with each other and jostle for each other’s affection. JB bases his entire artistic career on painting portraits of his friends, while Malcolm takes care of them by designing their apartments and houses. When Jude, as an adult, is adopted by his favorite Harvard law professor, his friends join him for Thanksgiving in Cambridge every year. And when Willem becomes a movie star, they all bask in his glow. Eventually, the tone darkens and the story narrows to focus on Jude as the pain of his past cuts deep into his carefully constructed life.
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.Pub Date: March 10, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-385-53925-8
Page Count: 720
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Dec. 21, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2015
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