There’s undoubtedly a great swashbuckling adventure story here, but Kleeberg has failed to unearth it.
This first U.S. publication of the German author is a leaden historical, based on a true story, about the (mostly) charmed life of an 18th-century German baron.
After a confusing start, the fog lifts to reveal a widow and her two children living in poverty in Lorraine, in northern France. The father, a nobleman from Westphalia, has died of consumption. In 1704 the family gains a benefactor, the Count de Mortagne, a courtier at Versailles, who secures a position as a page for the young Theodor von Neuhoff; he is the first of Theodor’s many patrons. The baron is quick to learn the way the court works, and the importance of gossip; his eavesdropping skills land him an assignment in Paris, where he loses his virginity and incurs huge gambling debts (he will be a lifelong spendthrift). From Paris the court sends him to the Hague as a secret agent to contact a high-ranking Swede, in league with the French against the English. Theodor is right at home in this world of complex rivalries, but Kleeberg is a poor guide for 18th-century Europe, a hodgepodge of nation-states, city-states, grand duchies and protectorates, and Theodor is a disappointing protagonist. Not substantial enough to be a hero or anti-hero, he is the consummate dilettante as he shifts allegiance from Sweden to Spain to the House of Habsburg. In the novel’s final third he finds himself in the thick of the struggle between Corsica and the Republic of Genoa, and offers himself to the Corsicans as their King. This brings him fame throughout Europe, but on the eve of his coronation he is still subject to mood swings (“I don’t want to do this anymore”). He eventually resumes his odyssey, and any drama drains out of the narrative in Kleeberg’s recitation of dates and places.
There’s undoubtedly a great swashbuckling adventure story here, but Kleeberg has failed to unearth it.Pub Date: May 6, 2008
ISBN: 978-1-59051-256-2
Page Count: 392
Publisher: Other Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2008
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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