An affecting depiction of the urgency of love and the inherent madness that so often comes with it.
Love, time and regret underpin this complicated story of love between two emotionally cautious doctors in modern-day Italy.
This ethereal tale is only the second of Canobbio's (The Natural Disorder of Things, 2006, etc.) eight novels to reach the U.S. It’s a rich story that explores the emotional insecurities of a variety of characters; it’s also linguistically complex and decidedly nonlinear. The novel is sometimes told from the perspective of a man looking back on the midlife crisis of his father, a doctor named Claudio Viberti who worked in a busy metropolitan hospital. More often, the tale is told by an omniscient narrator, though this could be the son imagining what transpired. The lonely doctor becomes infatuated with Cecilia, an emergency room doctor with two children who is vigilant about her emotions. They “date” by having lunch every day, but Cecilia cannot commit, so Viberti becomes increasingly frantic. “Did I race over here because I wanted to see her, and I couldn’t stand not seeing her, and I’m in love with her, or because I didn’t want to say no, and I was afraid I would regret it, and I’m afraid of being alone forever, and for some time a ridiculous idea has been stuck in my head, that it’s too late, that this is my last chance?” he asks himself. The relationship gets more complicated when Viberti has a physical encounter with a woman named Silvia, who happens to be Cecilia’s sister. The intricacies of the story are slowly revealed as we see first Viberti's perspective on a given situation, then Cecilia's and then Silvia's, punctuated by an occasional aside from Viberti's son. It might sound soap operatic, but Canobbio has an otherworldly cadence that carries the story aloft even when the dizzying shifts in point of view threaten to disorient readers.
An affecting depiction of the urgency of love and the inherent madness that so often comes with it.Pub Date: July 1, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-374-27890-8
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: June 4, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2014
BOOK REVIEW
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
BOOK TO SCREEN
A tour de force.
In 1974, a troubled Vietnam vet inherits a house from a fallen comrade and moves his family to Alaska.
After years as a prisoner of war, Ernt Allbright returned home to his wife, Cora, and daughter, Leni, a violent, difficult, restless man. The family moved so frequently that 13-year-old Leni went to five schools in four years. But when they move to Alaska, still very wild and sparsely populated, Ernt finds a landscape as raw as he is. As Leni soon realizes, “Everyone up here had two stories: the life before and the life now. If you wanted to pray to a weirdo god or live in a school bus or marry a goose, no one in Alaska was going to say crap to you.” There are many great things about this book—one of them is its constant stream of memorably formulated insights about Alaska. Another key example is delivered by Large Marge, a former prosecutor in Washington, D.C., who now runs the general store for the community of around 30 brave souls who live in Kaneq year-round. As she cautions the Allbrights, “Alaska herself can be Sleeping Beauty one minute and a bitch with a sawed-off shotgun the next. There’s a saying: Up here you can make one mistake. The second one will kill you.” Hannah’s (The Nightingale, 2015, etc.) follow-up to her series of blockbuster bestsellers will thrill her fans with its combination of Greek tragedy, Romeo and Juliet–like coming-of-age story, and domestic potboiler. She re-creates in magical detail the lives of Alaska's homesteaders in both of the state's seasons (they really only have two) and is just as specific and authentic in her depiction of the spiritual wounds of post-Vietnam America.
A tour de force.Pub Date: Feb. 6, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-312-57723-0
Page Count: 448
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Oct. 30, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2017
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