Long but without excess; philosophically charged but swiftly moving. A superb intellectual mystery.
Cuban writer Padura delivers a complex, ever deepening tale of politics and intrigue worthy of an Alan Furst or Roberto Bolaño.
Best known as a writer of literate procedurals, Padura turns to a deeper mystery, and one that is fraught with danger in most of the communist world—namely, the 1940 assassination in Mexico City of the dissident Bolshevik Leon Trotsky. To tell the story, Padura inserts roman à clef elements: A writer much like him, Iván Cárdenas Maturell, has run afoul of the regime for supposedly counterrevolutionary thought, and now, he has been hustled off in a quiet corner to edit a veterinary publication. Ironically, he remains the true believer of his past, ascetic and convinced that the socialist path leads to heaven: “[T]here is nothing closer to communist morality,” he remarks, “than Catholic precepts.” Now unmoored, he meets an old man who owns a brace of hounds and who, it turns out, was the assassin who did Trotsky in. As Iván and the dying Ramón Mercader, who has lived a life “so full of tremendous convulsions,” develop something that approaches a friendship, they chart the differences between the revolutionary generations of the 1930s and the 1960s, the point of view shifting back and forth to examine what might have worked and what certainly failed in the Soviet experiment. Trotsky, hounded by his longtime rival Josef Stalin, figures prominently in the narrative, querulous but rightfully aggrieved as he endures a life on the run; he can scarcely believe that “once the socialist dream was achieved, it would be necessary to call upon the proletariat to rebel against their own state.” Yet, until his appointed destiny with Mercader, that is just what he busies himself doing, causing a schism that persists—and one in which Padura’s aims will no doubt be argued over.
Long but without excess; philosophically charged but swiftly moving. A superb intellectual mystery.Pub Date: Dec. 3, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-374-20174-6
Page Count: 592
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: Oct. 19, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2013
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
Jonathan Livingston Kitty, it’s not.
A lonely postman learns that he’s about to die—and reflects on life as he bargains with a Hawaiian-shirt–wearing devil.
The 30-year-old first-person narrator in filmmaker/novelist Kawamura’s slim novel is, by his own admission, “boring…a monotone guy,” so unimaginative that, when he learns he has a brain tumor, the bucket list he writes down is dull enough that “even the cat looked disgusted with me.” Luckily—or maybe not—a friendly devil, dubbed Aloha, pops onto the scene, and he’s willing to make a deal: an extra day of life in exchange for being allowed to remove something pleasant from the world. The first thing excised is phones, which goes well enough. (The narrator is pleasantly surprised to find that “people seemed to have no problem finding something to fill up their free time.”) But deals with the devil do have a way of getting complicated. This leads to shallow musings (“Sometimes, when you rewatch a film after not having seen it for a long time, it makes a totally different impression on you than it did the first time you saw it. Of course, the movie hasn’t changed; it’s you who’s changed") written in prose so awkward, it’s possibly satire (“Tears dripped down onto the letter like warm, salty drops of rain”). Even the postman’s beloved cat, who gains the power of speech, ends up being prim and annoying. The narrator ponders feelings about a lost love, his late mother, and his estranged father in a way that some readers might find moving at times. But for many, whatever made this book a bestseller in Japan is going to be lost in translation.
Jonathan Livingston Kitty, it’s not.Pub Date: March 12, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-250-29405-0
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Flatiron Books
Review Posted Online: Feb. 16, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2019
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