A crucial addition to Tokarczuk’s oeuvre.
In a work that harks back to The Magic Mountain, a young Pole seeks treatment for tuberculosis.
In the latest from Nobel Prize–winner Tokarczuk, a young man suffering from tuberculosis seeks respite for his illness at a sanatorium in the Silesian mountains. When Mieczysław Wojnicz finds the resort itself full, he rents a room at the Guesthouse for Gentlemen, a small inn owned by Wilhelm Opitz, where, almost immediately, strange things start to happen: For one thing, Wojnicz starts hearing a cooing sound that seems to emanate from the attic; for another, the local herbal liqueur the men drink in the evenings might be affecting them in not-entirely-natural ways. But the main thrust of this novel, which repeatedly calls to mind Thomas Mann’s Magic Mountain, with which it shares a time period and setting, appears to be located in the debates that spring up between the men at the guesthouse, though Wojnicz rarely participates. “The subjects recurred, vanished and returned,” Tokarczuk writes. “Does man have a soul? Does he always act selfishly? Monarchy or democracy? Is socialism an opportunity for mankind? Can one tell whether a text was written by a man or a woman? Are women responsible enough to be allowed voting rights?” This is the direction in which the debates inevitably lead: the differences between men and women, and the ultimate, inevitable inferiority of women. The book, which is notably lacking in female characters, returns to this topic again and again, in increasingly subtle ways. But gender is just one of the mysteries at play here. Why won’t Wojnicz undress for the doctor? Why does another patient keep warning Wojnicz about violent deaths that supposedly occur at the sanatorium each year? Tokarczuk’s latest work reckons with some of the major intellectual questions of the 20th century while simultaneously spinning a mysterious—and spooky—web of intrigue and suspense.
A crucial addition to Tokarczuk’s oeuvre.Pub Date: Sept. 24, 2024
ISBN: 9780593712948
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Riverhead
Review Posted Online: July 10, 2024
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
PERSPECTIVES
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
BOOK TO SCREEN
A welcome literary resurrection that deserves a place alongside Wright’s best-known work.
A falsely accused Black man goes into hiding in this masterful novella by Wright (1908-1960), finally published in full.
Written in 1941 and '42, between Wright’s classics Native Son and Black Boy, this short novel concerns Fred Daniels, a modest laborer who’s arrested by police officers and bullied into signing a false confession that he killed the residents of a house near where he was working. In a brief unsupervised moment, he escapes through a manhole and goes into hiding in a sewer. A series of allegorical, surrealistic set pieces ensues as Fred explores the nether reaches of a church, a real estate firm, and a jewelry store. Each stop is an opportunity for Wright to explore themes of hope, greed, and exploitation; the real estate firm, Wright notes, “collected hundreds of thousands of dollars in rent from poor colored folks.” But Fred’s deepening existential crisis and growing distance from society keep the scenes from feeling like potted commentaries. As he wallpapers his underground warren with cash, mocking and invalidating the currency, he registers a surrealistic but engrossing protest against divisive social norms. The novel, rejected by Wright’s publisher, has only appeared as a substantially truncated short story until now, without the opening setup and with a different ending. Wright's take on racial injustice seems to have unsettled his publisher: A note reveals that an editor found reading about Fred’s treatment by the police “unbearable.” That may explain why Wright, in an essay included here, says its focus on race is “rather muted,” emphasizing broader existential themes. Regardless, as an afterword by Wright’s grandson Malcolm attests, the story now serves as an allegory both of Wright (he moved to France, an “exile beyond the reach of Jim Crow and American bigotry”) and American life. Today, it resonates deeply as a story about race and the struggle to envision a different, better world.
A welcome literary resurrection that deserves a place alongside Wright’s best-known work.Pub Date: April 20, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-59853-676-8
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Library of America
Review Posted Online: March 16, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2021
BOOK TO SCREEN
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