Enthralled by its own ambition and desire to shock, this book makes astonishing demands on readers’ good faith.
A violent story set in a nameless country, this book wavers, uncertain, between parable and reality, unable to commit to its own demands or come to terms with its premise.
The book follows Kitamura’s debut The Longshot, 2009, a finalist for the New York Public Library’s Young Lions Award. The titular forest is not named, the title a phrase borrowed from the great Modernist novelist Knut Hamsun. We meet Tom, the son of the nameless patriarch who calls his son Thomas. We hear of conflict between “whites” and “natives,” indicating a colonial conflict. We meet the faithful servant Celeste and her inscrutable son Jose. Celeste was Tom’s wet nurse. Tom and Jose grew up together; native and master suckled at the same breasts. The nameless patriarch arranges a marriage for Tom to the coquettish Carine. Carine is a guest of the Wallaces, the only characters to have surnames. We are not meant to reflect on this curiosity, nor are we to wonder about the mix of periods. Clothing, methods of travel and the lack of phones seem to evoke the end of the colonial period, and yet the farm is a “fishing resort”; there is fish farming and a reference to “pain management.” When a volcano erupts, it seems no more than an excuse to terrorize the hapless Tom, the nymphomaniac Carine and the nameless patriarch. The writing is too idiosyncratic to pass without comment. The sentences are short, declarative. Many are fragments. The style affected, the metaphors mixed, the effect pretentious: “The thought of the girl returns to him like a flood and she kicks inside his brain.”
Enthralled by its own ambition and desire to shock, this book makes astonishing demands on readers’ good faith.Pub Date: Aug. 7, 2012
ISBN: 978-1-4516-5664-0
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Free Press
Review Posted Online: July 21, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2012
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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