A book that is hard to get through yet hard to forget.
Turkish writer and political activist Livaneli (Bliss, 2006, etc.) uses the story of a modern Turkish woman’s relationship with an aged professor from America to delve into ugly truths about Turkey’s past.
The plot is a cerebral, low-wattage academic thriller. In 2001, 36-year-old Maya Duran, a divorced single mother who works at Istanbul University, is assigned to entertain 87-year-old visiting Harvard professor Max Wagner. Then government agents try to coerce Maya into keeping tabs on Max, who was born in Germany and lived in Turkey from 1939 to '42. Instead, she and her computer-nerd son, Kerem, begin researching Max to learn what secrets the agents fear he might expose. Meanwhile, she grapples with two secrets closer to home: Her paternal grandmother was an Armenian whose parents were massacred, and her maternal grandmother’s family was massacred for being Crimean Turks. Sharing an intense, platonic intimacy with Maya, Max (not himself Jewish) lovingly describes his love for his Jewish wife, Nadia, and her tragic death in what Maya herself calls a “separate section of my book.” Through Max’s story, Livaneli recounts a little-known actual World War II tragedy. In 1941, 769 Romanian Jewish refugees traveled on an ill-equipped ship bound for Palestine. The unseaworthy Struma reached Istanbul, where it sat for 71 day before Turkey—in collusion with Britain, which did not want the refugees to reach Palestine—had the ship with its broken engine hauled out to sea, where a Russian submarine torpedoed it. One passenger survived. Livaneli’s telling is heartbreakingly vivid, his despair over the potential for human and governmental cruelty deeply felt. In contrast, the fictional characters, particularly Maya, remain more strategic than emotionally engaging. Maya is too obviously mouthing the author’s arguments, dropping too many philosophers’ names along the way, and her narrative voice, at least in this translation, remains oddly cerebral even when she discusses her love life and her son. Yet Livaneli’s passion in exposing Turkey's and the West’s culpability in real massacres is eloquent enough to override his ho-hum fictional narrative.
A book that is hard to get through yet hard to forget.Pub Date: March 3, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-63542-016-6
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Other Press
Review Posted Online: Dec. 8, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2020
A tasty, if not always tasteful, tale of supernatural mayhem that fans of King and Crichton alike will enjoy.
Are we not men? We are—well, ask Bigfoot, as Brooks does in this delightful yarn, following on his bestseller World War Z(2006).
A zombie apocalypse is one thing. A volcanic eruption is quite another, for, as the journalist who does a framing voice-over narration for Brooks’ latest puts it, when Mount Rainier popped its cork, “it was the psychological aspect, the hyperbole-fueled hysteria that had ended up killing the most people.” Maybe, but the sasquatches whom the volcano displaced contributed to the statistics, too, if only out of self-defense. Brooks places the epicenter of the Bigfoot war in a high-tech hideaway populated by the kind of people you might find in a Jurassic Park franchise: the schmo who doesn’t know how to do much of anything but tries anyway, the well-intentioned bleeding heart, the know-it-all intellectual who turns out to know the wrong things, the immigrant with a tough backstory and an instinct for survival. Indeed, the novel does double duty as a survival manual, packed full of good advice—for instance, try not to get wounded, for “injury turns you from a giver to a taker. Taking up our resources, our time to care for you.” Brooks presents a case for making room for Bigfoot in the world while peppering his narrative with timely social criticism about bad behavior on the human side of the conflict: The explosion of Rainier might have been better forecast had the president not slashed the budget of the U.S. Geological Survey, leading to “immediate suspension of the National Volcano Early Warning System,” and there’s always someone around looking to monetize the natural disaster and the sasquatch-y onslaught that follows. Brooks is a pro at building suspense even if it plays out in some rather spectacularly yucky episodes, one involving a short spear that takes its name from “the sucking sound of pulling it out of the dead man’s heart and lungs.” Grossness aside, it puts you right there on the scene.
A tasty, if not always tasteful, tale of supernatural mayhem that fans of King and Crichton alike will enjoy.Pub Date: June 16, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-9848-2678-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Del Rey/Ballantine
Review Posted Online: Feb. 9, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK TO SCREEN
Dark and unsettling, this novel’s end arrives abruptly even as readers are still moving at a breakneck speed.
Ten years after her teenage daughter went missing, a mother begins a new relationship only to discover she can't truly move on until she answers lingering questions about the past.
Laurel Mack’s life stopped in many ways the day her 15-year-old daughter, Ellie, left the house to study at the library and never returned. She drifted away from her other two children, Hanna and Jake, and eventually she and her husband, Paul, divorced. Ten years later, Ellie’s remains and her backpack are found, though the police are unable to determine the reasons for her disappearance and death. After Ellie’s funeral, Laurel begins a relationship with Floyd, a man she meets in a cafe. She's disarmed by Floyd’s charm, but when she meets his young daughter, Poppy, Laurel is startled by her resemblance to Ellie. As the novel progresses, Laurel becomes increasingly determined to learn what happened to Ellie, especially after discovering an odd connection between Poppy’s mother and her daughter even as her relationship with Floyd is becoming more serious. Jewell’s (I Found You, 2017, etc.) latest thriller moves at a brisk pace even as she plays with narrative structure: The book is split into three sections, including a first one which alternates chapters between the time of Ellie’s disappearance and the present and a second section that begins as Laurel and Floyd meet. Both of these sections primarily focus on Laurel. In the third section, Jewell alternates narrators and moments in time: The narrator switches to alternating first-person points of view (told by Poppy’s mother and Floyd) interspersed with third-person narration of Ellie’s experiences and Laurel’s discoveries in the present. All of these devices serve to build palpable tension, but the structure also contributes to how deeply disturbing the story becomes. At times, the characters and the emotional core of the events are almost obscured by such quick maneuvering through the weighty plot.
Dark and unsettling, this novel’s end arrives abruptly even as readers are still moving at a breakneck speed.Pub Date: April 24, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-5011-5464-5
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Atria
Review Posted Online: Feb. 5, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2018
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