A kind of Virgin Suicides for the Soviet set, speaking to much that’s dark in the human soul—but to what can redeem it, too.
British historian Montefiore turns in his second novel, a foreboding tale of Soviet Russia based on actual events.
Given that Montefiore is a biographer of The Boss (Young Stalin, 2007, etc.), it’s fitting that, as in Anatoly Rybakov’s Children of the Arbat—whose spirit looms over this book—Josef Stalin should appear as a central character in this odd drama. Less usual, perhaps, is that Stalin has sympathetic moments: Late in the story, we find him reclining on a sofa, smoking a cigarette and thinking of lost love: “If only there had been more love in my life, he thought despondently, but we Bolsheviks are a military-religious order like the Knights Templar.” The romantic and slightly gloopy image suits the larger story, which concerns a class of well-heeled, privileged children who attend a school that’s out of Dead Poets Society, if with pictures of Lenin instead of Lord Byron. Young Andrei Kurbsky, from out in the sticks of the Soviet Empire, doesn't share their high status, but, a devotee of Pushkin, he nonetheless is swallowed up in a floppy-haired beatnik-manqué clique that adores the Romantic poets. That’s not such a smart move in an age when socialist realism is the only acceptable aesthetic, and Stalin—the sire of less-than-accomplished offspring, as we see—is as ruthless with the children of his own confidants as he is with his political enemies. Though the narrative lags at times, and though Montefiore sometimes inclines to the didactic (“The title ‘Comrade’ means Rimm was a member of the Communist Party”), the storyline is unusual enough to keep things moving. The characters, too, are strong and believable, all careening toward a fateful day. Though his novel is based on history and told with a historian’s concern for detail, Montefiore notes in an afterword that his is “not a novel about power but about private life—above all, love.” Yet, of course, it’s power that moves things to their grim conclusion.
A kind of Virgin Suicides for the Soviet set, speaking to much that’s dark in the human soul—but to what can redeem it, too.Pub Date: May 6, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-06-229188-2
Page Count: 480
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 6, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2014
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
This book sings with the terrible silence of dead civilizations in which once there was valor.
Written with quiet dignity that builds to a climax of tragic force, this book about the dissolution of an African tribe, its traditions, and values, represents a welcome departure from the familiar "Me, white brother" genre.
Written by a Nigerian African trained in missionary schools, this novel tells quietly the story of a brave man, Okonkwo, whose life has absolute validity in terms of his culture, and who exercises his prerogative as a warrior, father, and husband with unflinching single mindedness. But into the complex Nigerian village filters the teachings of strangers, teachings so alien to the tribe, that resistance is impossible. One must distinguish a force to be able to oppose it, and to most, the talk of Christian salvation is no more than the babbling of incoherent children. Still, with his guns and persistence, the white man, amoeba-like, gradually absorbs the native culture and in despair, Okonkwo, unable to withstand the corrosion of what he, alone, understands to be the life force of his people, hangs himself. In the formlessness of the dying culture, it is the missionary who takes note of the event, reminding himself to give Okonkwo's gesture a line or two in his work, The Pacification of the Primitive Tribes of the Lower Niger.
This book sings with the terrible silence of dead civilizations in which once there was valor.Pub Date: Jan. 23, 1958
ISBN: 0385474547
Page Count: 207
Publisher: McDowell, Obolensky
Review Posted Online: April 23, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1958
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BOOK REVIEW
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