by Pajtim Statovci ; translated by David Hackston ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 2, 2019
A centrifugal story told with great sensitivity and empathy, highlighting Statovci’s development as a leading voice in...
Kosovo-born Finnish novelist Statovci (My Cat Yugoslavia, 2017) returns with a beguiling story that proves the old adage about not being able to go home again—if one has a home at all.
“I am a man who cannot be a woman but who can sometimes look like a woman.” So says 22-year-old Bujar, who, it seems, can be anything he wishes to be, of any age and gender, any guise, supported by whatever story he can spin. Even though in his new life in Rome he takes pains to disguise his Albanian origins, he carries stories from his late father about his ancestral nation and the deeds of heroes whose hearts reside “in the breast of the black two-headed eagle on the flag.” Bujar lives as if he is alone, but with him is his childhood friend Agim, “a year older than me but much smaller,” who is smart and soulful and who adds to Bujar’s father’s stock of stories with other tales, such as the curious one about a farm governed by the animals there: “Imagine, Bujar, the animals form a totalitarian society." Bujar and Agim, heroes in their own way, are a shade too young to remember the most terrible excesses of totalitarianism in their homeland, but now, away, they are free to do as they wish—but not really, because sexual violence at the hands of brutish men is always a danger everywhere they travel, and in any event they’re despised for their foreignness, even if, as Bujar says, “Everybody around us wanted to be European, to belong to the European family, to stand on the other side of the invisible but insurmountable fence where people were people, at the forefront of humanity.” Marginalized in several dimensions, Bujar and Agim struggle to find their identities as well as a hint of the happiness that, as events unfold, seems ever more elusive.
A centrifugal story told with great sensitivity and empathy, highlighting Statovci’s development as a leading voice in modern European literature.Pub Date: April 2, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-5247-4749-7
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Pantheon
Review Posted Online: Jan. 20, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2019
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by Pajtim Statovci ; translated by David Hackston
BOOK REVIEW
by Pajtim Statovci translated by David Hackston
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by Kristin Hannah ‧ RELEASE DATE: Feb. 3, 2015
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
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BOOK TO SCREEN
SEEN & HEARD
by Robert Harris ‧ RELEASE DATE: Nov. 22, 2016
An illuminating read for anyone interested in the inner workings of the Catholic Church; for prelate-fiction superfans, it...
Harris, creator of grand, symphonic thrillers from Fatherland (1992) to An Officer and a Spy (2014), scores with a chamber piece of a novel set in the Vatican in the days after a fictional pope dies.
Fictional, yes, but the nameless pontiff has a lot in common with our own Francis: He’s famously humble, shunning the lavish Apostolic Palace for a small apartment, and he is committed to leading a church that engages with the world and its problems. In the aftermath of his sudden death, rumors circulate about the pope’s intention to fire certain cardinals. At the center of the action is Cardinal Lomeli, Dean of the College of Cardinals, whose job it is to manage the conclave that will elect a new pope. He believes it is also his duty to uncover what the pope knew before he died because some of the cardinals in question are in the running to succeed him. “In the running” is an apt phrase because, as described by Harris, the papal conclave is the ultimate political backroom—albeit a room, the Sistine Chapel, covered with Michelangelo frescoes. Vying for the papal crown are an African cardinal whom many want to see as the first black pope, a press-savvy Canadian, an Italian arch-conservative (think Cardinal Scalia), and an Italian liberal who wants to continue the late pope’s campaign to modernize the church. The novel glories in the ancient rituals that constitute the election process while still grounding that process in the real world: the Sistine Chapel is fitted with jamming devices to thwart electronic eavesdropping, and the pressure to act quickly is increased because “rumours that the pope is dead are already trending on social media.”
An illuminating read for anyone interested in the inner workings of the Catholic Church; for prelate-fiction superfans, it is pure temptation.Pub Date: Nov. 22, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-451-49344-6
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Sept. 6, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2016
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BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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