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
Doerr captures the sights and sounds of wartime and focuses, refreshingly, on the innate goodness of his major characters.
Doerr presents us with two intricate stories, both of which take place during World War II; late in the novel, inevitably, they intersect.
In August 1944, Marie-Laure LeBlanc is a blind 16-year-old living in the walled port city of Saint-Malo in Brittany and hoping to escape the effects of Allied bombing. D-Day took place two months earlier, and Cherbourg, Caen and Rennes have already been liberated. She’s taken refuge in this city with her great-uncle Etienne, at first a fairly frightening figure to her. Marie-Laure’s father was a locksmith and craftsman who made scale models of cities that Marie-Laure studied so she could travel around on her own. He also crafted clever and intricate boxes, within which treasures could be hidden. Parallel to the story of Marie-Laure we meet Werner and Jutta Pfennig, a brother and sister, both orphans who have been raised in the Children’s House outside Essen, in Germany. Through flashbacks we learn that Werner had been a curious and bright child who developed an obsession with radio transmitters and receivers, both in their infancies during this period. Eventually, Werner goes to a select technical school and then, at 18, into the Wehrmacht, where his technical aptitudes are recognized and he’s put on a team trying to track down illegal radio transmissions. Etienne and Marie-Laure are responsible for some of these transmissions, but Werner is intrigued since what she’s broadcasting is innocent—she shares her passion for Jules Verne by reading aloud 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea. A further subplot involves Marie-Laure’s father’s having hidden a valuable diamond, one being tracked down by Reinhold von Rumpel, a relentless German sergeant-major.
Doerr captures the sights and sounds of wartime and focuses, refreshingly, on the innate goodness of his major characters.Pub Date: May 6, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-4767-4658-6
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: March 5, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2014
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
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