A sweeping, ambitious story reminiscent at times of Pasternak in its grasp of both history and tragedy.
Voices whisper, fearful and secretive, across the generations in Russian novelist Ulitskaya’s (The Kukotsky Enigma, 2016, etc.) latest.
Nora Ossetsky is a Soviet icon of a kind, a single mother who resolutely raises her child alone while working to advance the cause of the fatherland. But, alas, in those days of Brezhnev and an arteriosclerotic state, she’s a bit of a bohemian, involved with a brilliant theater director who has decided that it would be better to wait out the repression back home with his wife in Tbilisi, a defeated retreat from Moscow after a staging of Chekhov is shut down on the eve of its premiere, having enraged “the ministerial special forces, the Party hacks" with its subtly subversive staging. Russian theater lies at the heart of Ulitskaya’s richly detailed story, which takes its title, subtly as well, from the musical Fiddler on the Roof, but so too do epic, multigenerational works of fiction—for underlying Nora’s story are those of her parents and grandparents, the latter from the revolutionary generation. The patriarch of the family is the watchmaker Pinchas Kerns, who has emigrated from Switzerland in time to watch the first stirrings of the anti-czarist uprisings; largely indifferent to politics—“He remained a craftsman all his life, and never quite grasped the finer, or even cruder, points of communism, much less capitalism”—Pinchas and his children are nevertheless swept up by events: war, the rise of the Stalinist state, and soon enough the gulag. “Even such a giant among men as Dostoevsky feared the horror of loneliness!” writes Nora’s grandfather Jacob, in a diary that tracks the horror not just of loneliness, but of being separated from family and society for the crime of being one whose “thinking was out of step.” Life improves for Nora with the end of the USSR, but even in 2011, at the end of the book, when “old age caught up with her," the fear remains.
A sweeping, ambitious story reminiscent at times of Pasternak in its grasp of both history and tragedy.Pub Date: July 9, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-374-29365-9
Page Count: 560
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: April 13, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2019
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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