Still, flaws in characterization aside, there’s plenty to enjoy here: lively intelligence, fine social history, and enough...
Musical prodigy vanishes on day of debut, is discovered four decades later by his childhood friend.
A confident first novel (and Whitbread Prize winner) from veteran English music journalist/author Lebrecht (Covent Garden, 2001, etc.) ranges widely through classical music, Jewish culture, and wartime London. It’s 1939, and narrator Martin Simmonds is the only child of middle-class Jews, his father a music publisher and impresario. His wretched loneliness ends when nine-year-old David-Eli Rapoport (Dovidl) comes to live with them. Dovidl has left his family in Warsaw to study the violin with a master. The two boys hit it off. Martin is happy to follow the lead of the dynamic Dovidl, reveling in his newfound self-esteem as Dovidl becomes his alter ego. They explore London together, enjoying the adventure of the Phony War, though when the bombs reach their neighborhood, Martin sees a darker side of his friend, who takes money off a corpse. His father has already warned him that every artist has “a hard core of brute egotism.” At war’s end, Dovidl learns that his family had been deported to Treblinka, and accepts their death. He continues playing, and old man Simmonds’s publicity campaign engenders huge expectations for his 1951 debut. His disappearance shatters the family. Martin’s father dies, his mother is institutionalized, and Martin salvages the business, entering a sterile “half-life,” listlessly raising his own family. Forward to 1991. Judging a provincial music contest, a young competitor’s use of rubato convinces Martin that his mentor was Dovidl. He tracks the player down and hears his story. Dovidl is a Talmudic scholar in an ultraorthodox sect, a transformation that began the day of his aborted debut. But would a blindly selfish genius ever have submitted so passively to his religious heritage? The about-face is hard to swallow, as is Martin’s eventual evolution from cautious fuddy-duddy to daring, hard-nosed avenger.
Still, flaws in characterization aside, there’s plenty to enjoy here: lively intelligence, fine social history, and enough of a novelist’s sensibility to make you hungry for more.Pub Date: Feb. 10, 2004
ISBN: 1-4000-3489-2
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Anchor
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2003
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
Miller makes Homer pertinent to women facing 21st-century monsters.
A retelling of ancient Greek lore gives exhilarating voice to a witch.
“Monsters are a boon for gods. Imagine all the prayers.” So says Circe, a sly, petulant, and finally commanding voice that narrates the entirety of Miller’s dazzling second novel. The writer returns to Homer, the wellspring that led her to an Orange Prize for The Song of Achilles (2012). This time, she dips into The Odyssey for the legend of Circe, a nymph who turns Odysseus’ crew of men into pigs. The novel, with its distinctive feminist tang, starts with the sentence: “When I was born, the name for what I was did not exist.” Readers will relish following the puzzle of this unpromising daughter of the sun god Helios and his wife, Perse, who had negligible use for their child. It takes banishment to the island Aeaea for Circe to sense her calling as a sorceress: “I will not be like a bird bred in a cage, I thought, too dull to fly even when the door stands open. I stepped into those woods and my life began.” This lonely, scorned figure learns herbs and potions, surrounds herself with lions, and, in a heart-stopping chapter, outwits the monster Scylla to propel Daedalus and his boat to safety. She makes lovers of Hermes and then two mortal men. She midwifes the birth of the Minotaur on Crete and performs her own C-section. And as she grows in power, she muses that “not even Odysseus could talk his way past [her] witchcraft. He had talked his way past the witch instead.” Circe’s fascination with mortals becomes the book’s marrow and delivers its thrilling ending. All the while, the supernatural sits intriguingly alongside “the tonic of ordinary things.” A few passages coil toward melodrama, and one inelegant line after a rape seems jarringly modern, but the spell holds fast. Expect Miller’s readership to mushroom like one of Circe’s spells.
Miller makes Homer pertinent to women facing 21st-century monsters.Pub Date: April 10, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-316-55634-7
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Jan. 22, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2018
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