A startling piece of work in its lack of affect, reminiscent of the fiction and memoir of Jerzy Kosinski and Agota Kristof.
Life behind the Iron Curtain in post-1956 Hungary provides the backdrop for a nightmare childhood.
Soon after Katalin gets on a train and defects to the West without a word to anyone, abandoning her husband Kalman, daughter Kata, and son Isti, the family leaves their farm and embarks on a peripatetic life. Kalman is a dangerous ne’er-do-well, dependent on the kindness of family and friends whose hospitality he repays with anger and disdain. Bitter, antisocial, and often drunk, Kalman is either unwilling or unable to care for the children properly. School, meals, and discipline go by the boards and are taken up by a series of mother-substitutes with whom the family lives as Kalman bounces from job to job and Kata strives to develop some type of normalcy with the various people who give them shelter. Someone teaches Isti, who has not been to school, to read and write. After a while, each member of the family finds a compensatory consolation: Kalman swims in the rivers and lakes near where they settle, Isti becomes fascinated by train schedules, and Kata creates imaginary worlds. From time to time, Katalin’s mother will arrive with word of her daughter, who has settled into a drab life as a dishwasher in Germany, including the story of their hardships in crossing the border. But such communication has little effect on the family’s belief in the future, which remains stunted. Soon their afternoon swims together become their only joint activity, when they can lose themselves in the sensuality of the water—until tragedy strikes, the final blow that destroys any semblance of family. Bánk’s language is spare and an absence of color dominates the novel, but such spareness provides The Swimmer with its impact, and a reflection of Kalman’s reticence.
A startling piece of work in its lack of affect, reminiscent of the fiction and memoir of Jerzy Kosinski and Agota Kristof.Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2005
ISBN: 0-15-100932-5
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Harcourt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2004
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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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