Inspired by a painting of the same title by Belgian artist Fernand Khnopff (1858-1921)—and the first in a series of such art-inspired fictions planned by Ecco—Oates's slim (112-page) new novella tells of an interracial love affair in early 20th-century rural New York—and its mysterious, tragic consequences. Edith Honeystone's mother died shortly after the girl's birth in 1890, but not before she nicknamed the red-haired infant "Calla"—a name the child clings to as she grows into a neglected, half-wild teen-ager with no discernible future. When George Freilicht, an unprepossessing farmer, foolishly finds the girl's smile intriguing, her relatives hastily marry her off. Bewildered, Calla moves about her unloved husband's property like a sleepwalker, taking refuge in solitary flights into the woods. Meanwhile, Calla manages to bear George two children (whom she generally ignores thereafter) before she encounters a kindred spirit in Tyrell Thompson, a black water, dowser. Her ensuing obsession with the itinerant worker causes a storm of gossip, virtually destroys the Freilicht family name, and breaks the spirit of Calla's husband. Still, the lovers stubbornly cling to one another until the townfolk have created an entire myth from the seeds of their passion: Edith is pregnant, people say; the black man is seven feet tall; Edith gave birth to a tainted baby and the family drowned it in the well. . . Such tales can end only in tragedy. Answering her lover's challenge, Calla accompanies him in a rowboat to the middle of the Chautauqua River, where the two drift toward dangerous Tintern Falls and their separate destinies while gazing steadily into each other's eyes. Such people "made gestures that lasted for life," reflects Calla's granddaughter, who narrates this account while marveling that that wild woman's blood courses through her own, apparently tamer, veins. Oates provides Khnopff's haunting work of art, to be featured on the cover, with an eloquent voice in this breathless, shadowy tale.
Pub Date: Oct. 1, 1990
ISBN: 0865381089
Page Count: 108
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: Oct. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 1990
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 strict report, worthy of sympathy.
A violent surfacing of adolescence (which has little in common with Tarkington's earlier, broadly comic, Seventeen) has a compulsive impact.
"Nobody big except me" is the dream world of Holden Caulfield and his first person story is down to the basic, drab English of the pre-collegiate. For Holden is now being bounced from fancy prep, and, after a vicious evening with hall- and roommates, heads for New York to try to keep his latest failure from his parents. He tries to have a wild evening (all he does is pay the check), is terrorized by the hotel elevator man and his on-call whore, has a date with a girl he likes—and hates, sees his 10 year old sister, Phoebe. He also visits a sympathetic English teacher after trying on a drunken session, and when he keeps his date with Phoebe, who turns up with her suitcase to join him on his flight, he heads home to a hospital siege. This is tender and true, and impossible, in its picture of the old hells of young boys, the lonesomeness and tentative attempts to be mature and secure, the awful block between youth and being grown-up, the fright and sickness that humans and their behavior cause the challenging, the dramatization of the big bang. It is a sorry little worm's view of the off-beat of adult pressure, of contemporary strictures and conformity, of sentiment….
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.Pub Date: June 15, 1951
ISBN: 0316769177
Page Count: -
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1951
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
APPRECIATIONS
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