by Raphaël Jerusalmy ; translated by Howard Curtis ‧ RELEASE DATE: Nov. 4, 2014
Literate. Brilliant. Entertaining.
Reaching back to the tumultuous 15th century, Jerusalmy chronicles a fictional tale of real-life brigand/poet François Villon, dispatched to find The Brotherhood of Book Hunters.
Jerusalmy’s dense and erudite narrative begins in Paris. Villon has been imprisoned for his writings, but Louis XI and Guillaume Chartier, bishop of Paris, are scheming to break Rome’s hold over France. The pair want Villon to lure Johann Fust, a Gutenberg ally, to Paris to establish a printing concern to make his books more available. The king’s plot later expands. He forces Villon and Colin de Cayeux, another Coquillard bandit, to journey to Jerusalem, “homeland of prophets and psalmists, peasants and fallen angels.” They’re to find the shadowy Brotherhood, an eclectic collection of Jews, revisionist Christians and others intent on preserving the world’s knowledge, and secure books to supply the Paris printing presses. As the hardy pair trek “from Rue St. Jacques to Genoa, from Acre to the monastery in Galilee and to Safed,” characters abound: the fashionable fop and de’ Medici agent Federico Castaldi; archivist Brother Médard, a cranky, combative dwarf; and young Rabbi Gamliel ben Sira, gaon of Safed, who speaks for the Brotherhood’s secret leader. In the library, located deep underground in “Invisible Jerusalem,” Villon learns the Brotherhood’s collection includes the “overwhelming testament dictated by Jesus to the high priest Annas just before his arrest,” a document critical to the Papacy and freethinkers alike. In deft translation, the novel sparkles with fanciful descriptions—“He would throw a judicious quotation at an eminent rival as you throw a knife at a straw target”—and Machiavellian machinations, highlighted by scholarly but accessible ruminations on Aristotle and Plato, religion and humanism, which are symbolically relevant to the forces gathering to bring on Reformation and Enlightenment, “to free the word from those who had been keeping it hostage in their chapels and cellars for centuries.”
Literate. Brilliant. Entertaining.Pub Date: Nov. 4, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-60945-230-8
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Europa Editions
Review Posted Online: Sept. 12, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2014
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by Roy Jacobsen ; translated by Don Bartlett & Don Shaw ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 7, 2020
A deeply satisfying novel, both sensuously vivid and remarkably poignant.
Norwegian novelist Jacobsen folds a quietly powerful coming-of-age story into a rendition of daily life on one of Norway’s rural islands a hundred years ago in a novel that was shortlisted for the 2017 Man Booker International Prize.
Ingrid Barrøy, her father, Hans, mother, Maria, grandfather Martin, and slightly addled aunt Barbro are the owners and sole inhabitants of Barrøy Island, one of numerous small family-owned islands in an area of Norway barely touched by the outside world. The novel follows Ingrid from age 3 through a carefree early childhood of endless small chores, simple pleasures, and unquestioned familial love into her more ambivalent adolescence attending school off the island and becoming aware of the outside world, then finally into young womanhood when she must make difficult choices. Readers will share Ingrid’s adoration of her father, whose sense of responsibility conflicts with his romantic nature. He adores Maria, despite what he calls her “la-di-da” ways, and is devoted to Ingrid. Twice he finds work on the mainland for his sister, Barbro, but, afraid she’ll be unhappy, he brings her home both times. Rooted to the land where he farms and tied to the sea where he fishes, Hans struggles to maintain his family’s hardscrabble existence on an island where every repair is a struggle against the elements. But his efforts are Sisyphean. Life as a Barrøy on Barrøy remains precarious. Changes do occur in men’s and women’s roles, reflected in part by who gets a literal chair to sit on at meals, while world crises—a war, Sweden’s financial troubles—have unexpected impact. Yet the drama here occurs in small increments, season by season, following nature’s rhythm through deaths and births, moments of joy and deep sorrow. The translator’s decision to use roughly translated phrases in conversation—i.e., “Tha’s goen’ nohvar” for "You’re going nowhere")—slows the reading down at first but ends up drawing readers more deeply into the world of Barrøy and its prickly, intensely alive inhabitants.
A deeply satisfying novel, both sensuously vivid and remarkably poignant.Pub Date: April 7, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-77196-319-0
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Biblioasis
Review Posted Online: Jan. 12, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2020
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by Heather Morris ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 4, 2018
The writing is merely serviceable, and one can’t help but wish the author had found a way to present her material as...
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An unlikely love story set amid the horrors of a Nazi death camp.
Based on real people and events, this debut novel follows Lale Sokolov, a young Slovakian Jew sent to Auschwitz in 1942. There, he assumes the heinous task of tattooing incoming Jewish prisoners with the dehumanizing numbers their SS captors use to identify them. When the Tätowierer, as he is called, meets fellow prisoner Gita Furman, 17, he is immediately smitten. Eventually, the attraction becomes mutual. Lale proves himself an operator, at once cagey and courageous: As the Tätowierer, he is granted special privileges and manages to smuggle food to starving prisoners. Through female prisoners who catalog the belongings confiscated from fellow inmates, Lale gains access to jewels, which he trades to a pair of local villagers for chocolate, medicine, and other items. Meanwhile, despite overwhelming odds, Lale and Gita are able to meet privately from time to time and become lovers. In 1944, just ahead of the arrival of Russian troops, Lale and Gita separately leave the concentration camp and experience harrowingly close calls. Suffice it to say they both survive. To her credit, the author doesn’t flinch from describing the depravity of the SS in Auschwitz and the unimaginable suffering of their victims—no gauzy evasions here, as in Boy in the Striped Pajamas. She also manages to raise, if not really explore, some trickier issues—the guilt of those Jews, like the tattooist, who survived by doing the Nazis’ bidding, in a sense betraying their fellow Jews; and the complicity of those non-Jews, like the Slovaks in Lale’s hometown, who failed to come to the aid of their beleaguered countrymen.
The writing is merely serviceable, and one can’t help but wish the author had found a way to present her material as nonfiction. Still, this is a powerful, gut-wrenching tale that is hard to shake off.Pub Date: Sept. 4, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-06-279715-5
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: July 16, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2018
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