History writ large, bold, vivid, and real: mesmerizing and authentic.
Winner of the Prix Goncourt and Grand Prix Roman de l’ Académie Française, Rambaud’s first novel completes a job Balzac long intended to do but never did: retelling Napoleon’s 1809 battle with, and defeat at the hands of, the Austrians in a fight visible from Vienna’s walls and known now as Aspern-Essling for the villages of those names.
Like war stories from the Iliad to War and Peace, this one again is conventional of plot as it follows three nights and two days in the lives of assorted figures—of high station and low—who either fight in the battle or are swept somehow into its huge vortex (as, one may add, readers will be too). Here are Napoleon himself; Major General Berthier, his right-hand man; the semi-piratic but courageous Masséna, duke of Rivoli; the prim and dandyish Edmonde de Périgord; and the engaging, battle-wearied, near-despairing Marshall Lannes. Toward the more middle rank of society are Colonel Louis-François Lejeune, artist, aide, officer, and perhaps central character; his inamorata Anna Krauss, denizen of imperial Vienna, who will run off with another; and Lejeune’s friend, the also-smitten Henri Beyle, “who had not yet started calling himself Stendhal.” As well, there are the plain soldiers—like Pacotte, or the young Vincent Paradis, or the toughened fighter Fayolle, raised in the slums of Paris—who will fight and, in any number of ghastly ways, die. For it’s the battle itself, enormous, dreadful, like some huge and perverted force of nature beyond the control of any man—even of the Emperor—that is the true determiner of all things here, compelling men to rush into death, undergo sufferings and atrocities far beyond the credible, and then, if need be, do it again. The horrors—including those of the amputation-obsessed field surgeons—will fade no time soon, as neither, credit to Rambaud’s great learning, will the detailed feel, sense, and pulse of politics and history that underlie the whole.
History writ large, bold, vivid, and real: mesmerizing and authentic.Pub Date: May 1, 2000
ISBN: 0-8021-1662-0
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Grove
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2000
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Suspenseful, full of incident, and not obviously necessary.
Atwood goes back to Gilead.
The Handmaid’s Tale (1985), consistently regarded as a masterpiece of 20th-century literature, has gained new attention in recent years with the success of the Hulu series as well as fresh appreciation from readers who feel like this story has new relevance in America’s current political climate. Atwood herself has spoken about how news headlines have made her dystopian fiction seem eerily plausible, and it’s not difficult to imagine her wanting to revisit Gilead as the TV show has sped past where her narrative ended. Like the novel that preceded it, this sequel is presented as found documents—first-person accounts of life inside a misogynistic theocracy from three informants. There is Agnes Jemima, a girl who rejects the marriage her family arranges for her but still has faith in God and Gilead. There’s Daisy, who learns on her 16th birthday that her whole life has been a lie. And there's Aunt Lydia, the woman responsible for turning women into Handmaids. This approach gives readers insight into different aspects of life inside and outside Gilead, but it also leads to a book that sometimes feels overstuffed. The Handmaid’s Tale combined exquisite lyricism with a powerful sense of urgency, as if a thoughtful, perceptive woman was racing against time to give witness to her experience. That narrator hinted at more than she said; Atwood seemed to trust readers to fill in the gaps. This dynamic created an atmosphere of intimacy. However curious we might be about Gilead and the resistance operating outside that country, what we learn here is that what Atwood left unsaid in the first novel generated more horror and outrage than explicit detail can. And the more we get to know Agnes, Daisy, and Aunt Lydia, the less convincing they become. It’s hard, of course, to compete with a beloved classic, so maybe the best way to read this new book is to forget about The Handmaid’s Tale and enjoy it as an artful feminist thriller.
Suspenseful, full of incident, and not obviously necessary.Pub Date: Sept. 10, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-385-54378-1
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Nan A. Talese
Review Posted Online: Sept. 3, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2019
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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
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