A sympathetic but sketchy portrait of a legend.
Coelho’s (Adultery, 2014, etc.) novel about Mata Hari, the notorious and (in all likelihood) falsely accused World War I spy, hews closely to the facts.
A prologue reveals what we already know from history: Mata Hari was executed by firing squad in Paris on Oct. 15, 1917. The rest of the book consists of Mata’s fictional letter to her defense attorney, M. Clunet, written while on death row in the Saint-Lazare prison, and a similarly speculative letter of regret by Clunet. Mata cynically and philosophically details her bare-bones autobiography: she was born Margaretha Zelle to a bourgeois family in Holland. Raped by a school principal at 16, she is desperate to escape school and Holland: this she achieves by marrying a Dutch army captain and moving to Indonesia. The officer beats and sexually abuses her for years, until another military wife’s suicide and a performance by Javanese dancers inspire Margaretha to rebel and return to Europe. Making her way to Paris, she introduces herself as Mata Hari to an impresario, Monsieur Guimet, who invites her to premiere her act—a spectacle that combines Java-esque dance moves and strip tease—at his museum. Her performances, a mélange of titillation and sophistication, quickly catapult her to fame in the priciest nightclubs; soon she's the toast of Paris. With this go riches accumulated as the mistress of wealthy industrialists and bankers. Living only for pleasure, Mata is oblivious to the approaching hostilities of the Great War, so when she is invited to perform in Berlin, she goes without hesitation only to find that she is being recruited as a spy for the kaiser. What follows is a grim comedy of errors as Mata, after traveling back to Paris through a war zone, offers her services to France as a double agent. Unfortunately, her French handler has a hidden agenda. The absurdity of the charges against Mata Hari comes through clearly, but even as she tells her own story we never get a sense of her humanity, only her various personas and masks.
A sympathetic but sketchy portrait of a legend.Pub Date: Nov. 15, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-5247-3206-6
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Oct. 5, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2016
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
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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