This master storyteller ensures that the book is continually intriguing and charming. Yet taken together, the two narratives...
The Nobel laureate weaves together the tragicomic misfortunes of two families and several friends in this tale of crime, passion and avarice.
Vargas Llosa (The Dream of the Celt, 2012, etc.) turns from the broad historical and political concerns of his previous novel to look at how blood ties unravel when money and deceit come into play. In Lima, Peru, the wealthy, aged widower Ismael surprises everyone—not least his two wayward sons—by suddenly marrying his much younger housekeeper.When the newlyweds fly off on a long honeymoon, the sons’ anger at losing their inheritance is directed at Rigoberto, Ismael’s longtime employee and friend and one of the witnesses to the couple’s furtive ceremony. The ensuing personal threats and legal wrangling add to Rigoberto’s troubled preoccupation with his teenage son’s reports that a dapper, possibly demonic man has been appearing out of nowhere and talking to him. In the nearby city of Piura, Felícito’s peace of mind unravels when he receives an extortionate note that threatens his transport business and mistress. One of his two sons is a good fellow, the other anything but, and Felícito has never been sure he’s the father of the scapegrace. As the plots move toward various resolutions, the reunion of two sisters fits right in with all the other pairings. The themes of paternity and filial respect get a good workout, with permutations touching on the self-made man, inherited wealth, marital tolerance and sex after 70. Felícito’s is the stronger story, as he is the book’s richest character, and Vargas Llosa spends much time walking him around a city the author once lived in, giving readers a true feel for the streets, sounds and ceaseless heat.
This master storyteller ensures that the book is continually intriguing and charming. Yet taken together, the two narratives don’t make a strong whole, rather more a theme and variation that can seem sometimes dangerously close to what Rigoberto at one point calls his side of the story: a soap opera.Pub Date: March 10, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-374-14674-0
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: Dec. 21, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2015
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
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