An evocative work by a prize-winning German author, now England-based, consists of four distinct stories of Jewish emigration over the last century: in each piece, not only the personal drama but the zeitgeist of the occasion is cannily, compellingly revealed. Bending each narrative into a form of personal reminiscence, complete with photographs woven into the text, the tribulation of each elusive subject is patiently uncovered by the narrator, starting with old Dr. Selwyn, whom the narrator meets in the garden of an English country house. In a unique confessional moment, this friendly if distant neighbor reveals his lower-class Lithuanian origins and the process of his assimilation into British society, which in his retirement he finds increasingly foreign. Soon after this confession, he shoots himself. Similarly, Paul Bereyter, the narrator's retired and reclusive grade-school teacher, ends his life by lying down in front of a train, prompting his ex-pupil to explore his past, discovering Bereyter's consuming and destructive relationship with Nazism. The life of Ambros Adelwarth describes a more colorful but no less destructive arc as the young manservant (the narrator's great uncle) finds employment with one of the most prominent ÇmigrÇ families in New York. The personal companion of the family scion, he travels the world with his charge, as an equal, in the years before and after WW I, but the scion slowly succumbs to madness and dies institutionalized; Ambros, eventually overpowered by his memories, voluntarily enters an asylum, where he dies as a result of shock therapy. Finally, an encounter with the artist Max Ferber in the decaying English port of Manchester during the narrator's college years prompts him to return much later, when he learns how Ferber escaped from the Nazis but lost his entire family in the Holocaust. The pervasive melancholy in these lives that are locked in tragedy is formidable, but at the same time the lyricism and immediacy of the narratives are marvelous to behold: a profound and moving work that should leave no reader unaffected.
Pub Date: Oct. 25, 1996
ISBN: 0-8112-1338-2
Page Count: 256
Publisher: New Directions
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1996
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
Doerr captures the sights and sounds of wartime and focuses, refreshingly, on the innate goodness of his major characters.
Doerr presents us with two intricate stories, both of which take place during World War II; late in the novel, inevitably, they intersect.
In August 1944, Marie-Laure LeBlanc is a blind 16-year-old living in the walled port city of Saint-Malo in Brittany and hoping to escape the effects of Allied bombing. D-Day took place two months earlier, and Cherbourg, Caen and Rennes have already been liberated. She’s taken refuge in this city with her great-uncle Etienne, at first a fairly frightening figure to her. Marie-Laure’s father was a locksmith and craftsman who made scale models of cities that Marie-Laure studied so she could travel around on her own. He also crafted clever and intricate boxes, within which treasures could be hidden. Parallel to the story of Marie-Laure we meet Werner and Jutta Pfennig, a brother and sister, both orphans who have been raised in the Children’s House outside Essen, in Germany. Through flashbacks we learn that Werner had been a curious and bright child who developed an obsession with radio transmitters and receivers, both in their infancies during this period. Eventually, Werner goes to a select technical school and then, at 18, into the Wehrmacht, where his technical aptitudes are recognized and he’s put on a team trying to track down illegal radio transmissions. Etienne and Marie-Laure are responsible for some of these transmissions, but Werner is intrigued since what she’s broadcasting is innocent—she shares her passion for Jules Verne by reading aloud 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea. A further subplot involves Marie-Laure’s father’s having hidden a valuable diamond, one being tracked down by Reinhold von Rumpel, a relentless German sergeant-major.
Doerr captures the sights and sounds of wartime and focuses, refreshingly, on the innate goodness of his major characters.Pub Date: May 6, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-4767-4658-6
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: March 5, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2014
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
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