The novel, with its distinctive feminist tang, starts with the sentence: “When I was born, the name for what I was did not exist.” Readers will relish following the puzzle of this unpromising daughter of the sun god Helios and his wife, Perse, who had negligible use for their child. This time, she dips into The Odyssey for the legend of Circe, a nymph who turns Odysseus’ crew of men into pigs. The writer returns to Homer, the wellspring that led her to an Orange Prize for The Song of Achilles (2012). Imagine all the prayers.” So says Circe, a sly, petulant, and finally commanding voice that narrates the entirety of Miller’s dazzling second novel. Still, a respectful and absorbing page-turner.Ī retelling of ancient Greek lore gives exhilarating voice to a witch. Hannah’s proven storytelling skills are ideally suited to depicting such cataclysmic events, but her tendency to sentimentalize undermines the gravitas of this tale. 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. Meanwhile, Viann’s journey from passive to active resistance is less dramatic but no less wrenching. Code-named the Nightingale, Isabelle will rescue many before she's captured. She joins the Resistance, volunteering for dangerous duty: shepherding downed Allied airmen across the Pyrenees to Spain. Beck, at Le Jardin-Isabelle’s outspokenness is a liability. 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. Soon, that world is upended: The Germans march into Paris and refugees flee south, overrunning Viann’s land. 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. Cut to spring, 1940: Viann has said goodbye to husband Antoine, who's off to hold the Maginot line against invading Germans. 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. In 1995, an elderly unnamed widow is moving into an Oregon nursing home on the urging of her controlling son, Julien, a surgeon. Hannah’s new novel is an homage to the extraordinary courage and endurance of Frenchwomen during World War II. Where the classic Radetsky March could woo any reader with its breadth, insight and humor, this novel offers a sentimental miniaturist painting soppy little scenes that maybe only a Roth completist will appreciate. Ticking clocks and trickling sand in “an hourglass of polished beryl” are less than subtle reminders of “his enemy, Time.” Roth dwells at length on his solitude and his consciousness of time running short. Aside from reviewing his troops, studying his maps and visiting his mom, Napoleon does little until his coach ride to Belgium and flight to the Atlantic and his last jailers, the British. She will also find refuge during the Elba days in the bed of a kind Polish cobbler with a wooden leg. Angelina briefly interrupts her adoration of the man, “so great that everything in the world was his,” to dally with the “world of sabres, spurs, boots and woven braid” in the person of “the magnificent Sergeant-Major Sosthene,” a comic giant and the drummer boy’s dad. The second of these, on his final battlefield, is, like many of the book’s stronger scenes, damp with bathos. Napoleon has an encounter with the washerwoman that leads to an almost-tryst, as well as two brushes with her son, a drummer boy in the army. In this slim historical novel, the author dwells on the Corsican’s solitude, ambitions and shifting emotions in two sections, while two others concern a palace laundress named Angelina, also Corsican, who is infatuated with the emperor and whose aunt tells fortunes for the great man. Roth ( Joseph Roth: A Life in Letters, 2012, etc.) focuses on the period (actually 111 days) between Napoleon’s triumphant return to Paris from banishment on Elba and his defeat at Waterloo, imagining a great man moving toward his downfall. Sympathy for characters vies with purplish prose and blaring symbols in this reimagining of Napoleon’s brief resurgence after his first exile.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |