A visceral, sweeping depiction of life in the shuddering wake of wartime.
Three families, whose lives are inextricably linked by the street they inhabit, grapple with love and morality amid political upheaval.
In English for the first time and impeccably translated by Rix (The Door, 2015), Szabó’s quietly captivating novel excavates the tangled history of Hungary’s capital from the portentous moments before the German occupation to its suffocating postwar regime. In 1934, enveloped by a garden “teeming with roses,” we meet Irén and Blanka Elekes, Bálint Biró, and Henriette Held, the beloved children of three neighboring families who live on the titular Katalin Street. The four of them are inseparable, like cousins, apart from the fact that each of the girls, at one time or another, has loved Bálint, the major’s son. “Bálint was the sort of person who inspired that response from others without in the least intending to,” Irén observes. “You simply had to love him.” In Irén’s case, her unuttered desires are requited when she and Bálint are engaged a decade later. As soon as their celebration begins, though, it’s disrupted by a phone call and eclipsed by the reality of war; Henriette’s Jewish parents have been caught and deported and their home swiftly commandeered by authorities. But it’s the tragic death of 16-year-old Henriette, who's been hidden by the major and the Elekes family, that ultimately tears these families apart. By the time they’re eventually married, Bálint, who adored Henriette like his own sister, and Irén, who both loved and loathed the girl, are strangers, having long ago buried the happiness they once knew. Beset by a deep malaise from the aftershock of war, the Elekes family, forced from their home and dispossessed in every sense, live as ghosts, the past forever looping in their consciousnesses, “locked in the same hopeless quest to recover [Katalin Street].” And Henriette, a spectral presence hovering throughout the novel, acts as an onlooker, bearing witness to the emotional decay brought on by the relentless forces of age and memory.
A visceral, sweeping depiction of life in the shuddering wake of wartime.Pub Date: Sept. 5, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-68137-152-8
Page Count: 240
Publisher: New York Review Books
Review Posted Online: July 3, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2017
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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