At times as cruelly beautiful as Paul Bowles’s godless prose, this Sphinx-like novel offers a striking portrait of the...
A young woman of means travels alone from England to Palestine circa 1906 to study flowers referenced in the Bible.
Ill at ease on her wealthy parents’ estate, Beatrice Campbell-Bennett, protagonist of this novel exploring the fine line between religious ecstasy and psychosis, arrives in Jaffa with her paints, sketchbook and a desire to purge herself of unrequited love for Vanessa Stephen, Virginia Woolf’s older sister. Traveling on horseback, Beatrice makes her determined way across the burning, stone-and-ancient-ruins–littered Holy Land accompanied by her dragoman, Aziz, an Arab youth fluent in English who often mocks her Christian devotion. (He saves his venom for immigrating Jews.) As they progress, Beatrice identifies and sketches the rose of Jericho, the Sodom apple, the buckthorn, from which Christ’s crown was made, and nard, an aromatic from the Song of Solomon, but not the mandrake, the flower Leah used to purchase a night with Jacob. And so they travel on. During their journey, much to Aziz’s consternation, Beatrice meets and grows to admire several pilgrim Jews, whose religious rituals and vengeful God appeal to her longing for expiation. A brutal rape and its consequences bring Beatrice’s sanity and future into question. Told only through Beatrice’s letters home, her private journals, which at times seem to belie her correspondence, and the analytical notes of an initially skeptical psychiatrist who is sent by Beatrice’s parents to find their daughter, the story treks through the vast historical conundrum that is Palestine, while at the same time revealing the motives of Beatrice. Megged (Foiglman, 2003, etc.), winner of the Koret and Israel prizes, adroitly addresses the difficulty of finding truth among competing versions of the same story.
At times as cruelly beautiful as Paul Bowles’s godless prose, this Sphinx-like novel offers a striking portrait of the Middle East—past, present and, perhaps, future.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2005
ISBN: 1-59264-057-5
Page Count: 220
Publisher: Toby Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2005
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
These letters from some important executive Down Below, to one of the junior devils here on earth, whose job is to corrupt mortals, are witty and written in a breezy style seldom found in religious literature. The author quotes Luther, who said: "The best way to drive out the devil, if he will not yield to texts of Scripture, is to jeer and flout him, for he cannot bear scorn." This the author does most successfully, for by presenting some of our modern and not-so-modern beliefs as emanating from the devil's headquarters, he succeeds in making his reader feel like an ass for ever having believed in such ideas. This kind of presentation gives the author a tremendous advantage over the reader, however, for the more timid reader may feel a sense of guilt after putting down this book. It is a clever book, and for the clever reader, rather than the too-earnest soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1942
ISBN: 0060652934
Page Count: 53
Publisher: Macmillan
Review Posted Online: Oct. 17, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1943
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