Alderman re-creates with startling immediacy the culture of first-century Judea, with its political intrigue and riots and...
Four narratives set during the time of the ministry, trial and death of Jesus, all involving characters central to the origin of Christianity.
The book opens with the sacrifice of a lamb at the temple and ends with Bar-Avo (Barabbas) cutting the throat of Ananus, the High Priest of the Temple, and “bleed[ing] him like a lamb,” so there’s an obvious symmetry in the narrative arc Alderman sets up. In between these two sacrifices, we learn how the major characters she focuses on relate to the story of Yehoshuah of Nazaret (later Romanized to Jesus of Nazareth, though throughout her re-telling, Alderman uses Hebrew names). The first story is that of Miryam (Mary), mother of a man whose mission she doesn’t understand, and she remains bitter about the loss of her son. Her husband, Yosef, is even more uncomprehending and angry, definitively breaking with his son about a ministry that seems to him idiosyncratic and misguided. The next novella-length narrative introduces us to Iehuda from Qeriot (Judas Iscariot), who, from a later perspective, recounts the “strange tale” of his attachment to Yehoshuah, to the amusement of Calidorus, a Roman merchant, and his guests at a feast. Following Iehuda’s version of events comes that of Caiaphas, a High Priest of the Temple, who tries to resist the pressure of Roman politicians but who ends up turning Yehoshuah over to Pontius Pilate, the Prefect of Judea. The last narrative is that of Bar-Avo, a Jewish revolutionary and assassin who’s caught just before Passover. The rebel band he’s been leading forms a large part of the crowd when Pilate engages in the “Roman sport” of letting the crowd decide who will be released.
Alderman re-creates with startling immediacy the culture of first-century Judea, with its political intrigue and riots and with its characters wondering at what the life of Yehoshuah has meant to them.Pub Date: March 11, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-316-23278-4
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Feb. 3, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2013
The Brat Pack meets The Bacchae in this precious, way-too-long, and utterly unsuspenseful town-and-gown murder tale. A bunch of ever-so-mandarin college kids in a small Vermont school are the eager epigones of an aloof classics professor, and in their exclusivity and snobbishness and eagerness to please their teacher, they are moved to try to enact Dionysian frenzies in the woods. During the only one that actually comes off, a local farmer happens upon them—and they kill him. But the death isn't ruled a murder—and might never have been if one of the gang—a cadging sybarite named Bunny Corcoran—hadn't shown signs of cracking under the secret's weight. And so he too is dispatched. The narrator, a blank-slate Californian named Richard Pepen chronicles the coverup. But if you're thinking remorse-drama, conscience masque, or even semi-trashy who'll-break-first? page-turner, forget it: This is a straight gee-whiz, first-to-have-ever-noticed college novel—"Hampden College, as a body, was always strangely prone to hysteria. Whether from isolation, malice, or simple boredom, people there were far more credulous and excitable than educated people are generally thought to be, and this hermetic, overheated atmosphere made it a thriving black petri dish of melodrama and distortion." First-novelist Tartt goes muzzy when she has to describe human confrontations (the murder, or sex, or even the ping-ponging of fear), and is much more comfortable in transcribing aimless dorm-room paranoia or the TV shows that the malefactors anesthetize themselves with as fate ticks down. By telegraphing the murders, Tartt wants us to be continually horrified at these kids—while inviting us to semi-enjoy their manneristic fetishes and refined tastes. This ersatz-Fitzgerald mix of moralizing and mirror-looking (Jay McInerney shook and poured the shaker first) is very 80's—and in Tartt's strenuous version already seems dated, formulaic. Les Nerds du Mal—and about as deep (if not nearly as involving) as a TV movie.
Pub Date: Sept. 16, 1992
ISBN: 1400031702
Page Count: 592
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1992
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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
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