Men tell stories. Women get on with it. For us it was a shadow war. There were no parades for us when it was over, no medals or mentions in history books. We did what we had to during the war, and when it was over, we picked up the pieces and started our lives over.I've had several people tell me that The Nightingale was their favourite read of 2015 , and as it also won the Goodreads poll for best Historical Fiction for that year, I thought it was past time I read it, too. It tells the story of two estranged sisters – Vianne and Isabelle Rossignol – and what they did to survive (and fight back against in their own ways) the Nazi occupation of France during WWII. Focused as it is on the women's stories that are too seldom told, I thought that this was some really important subject matter to explore through fiction, but with cliched, noncredible, and overblown writing, I don't think that Kristin Hannah pulled it off. This was an annoying read for me. This is the kind of thing I hated:
From the moment she boarded this train bound for Saint-Jean-de-Luz, she would no longer be Isabelle Rossignol, the girl in the bookshop who lived on the Avenue de La Bourdonnais. From now on, she was Juliette Gervaise, code name the Nightingale.So, because Isabelle's last name means nightingale, the Resistance gives her the code name Nightingale. This means that the French edition of this book must have a line like, “Your last name is Rossignol so we will give you the code name Rossignol and no one will ever suspect it is you”. As these French characters were presumably speaking French to one another, this is exactly how the original conversation would have went. And the book is riddled with such lazy incomprehensibles. When Isabelle and Gaetan seek shelter in a church while the German planes are strafing the countryside, it says, “Bullets ran across the church, nailing arms and legs to the floor.” That's not how bullets work; even as a metaphor, it's dumb: if people are only shot in the arms and legs, I doubt they would be immobile; I picture writhing and crawling and attempts to find better shelter. And if the Nazis were desperately searching for whoever was distributing Resistance fliers, why couldn't they have followed Isabelle's footprints through “the thigh high snow” back to Le Jardin? Why couldn't the German Shepherds have followed the downed airman's scent (and blood trail!) straight to Vianne's barn? When a book is so bad at the details, I just can't buy into the bigger story. And I hated lines like this:
But when he looked at her – and she looked at him– they both knew that there was something worse than kissing the wrong person. It was wanting to.Not only do I question the actual logic of that passage (it sounds good but doesn't survive scrutiny), but the frequent dips into such purple prose felt totally out of place in a book about war. I am completely on board with exploring how love can bloom even in war time and there is a place for acknowledging that not all Nazi officers were demons in jackboots – that a woman, scared and alone, might respond to offers of affection and protection from a man who could provide both – but it's the writing that killed me. I hated that the reader needed to be told over and over that Isabelle is uncontrollable because she has always wanted love that never came; over and over that their father was mysteriously “broken” by WWI; that Vianne wished she had been a better sister and can't quite explain why she wasn't (yet even in the present day can't help but reject Isabelle). This book totally fails at the “show, don't tell” philosophy: I wish I had marked one of the many eye-rolling passages, but repeatedly, a character would enter a scene, and even though we've been told enough back story to imagine how that person is feeling, it would spell out, again, all that back story and then make those feelings explicit. It's obvious that Hannah did sufficient research, but I was annoyed by her efforts to cram it all in, annoyed by bits like:
After retrieving her worn gardening gloves and stepping into the boots by the door, she made her way to the garden positioned on a flat patch of land between the shed and the barn. Potatoes, onions, carrots, broccoli, peas, beans, cucumbers, tomatoes, and radishes grew in carefully contained rows. She knelt down on the rich, black dirt and began pulling weeds.I'm annoyed just by the mention of the garden being “positioned on a flat patch of land between the shed and the barn”, so you can imagine what I thought of listing all the variety of vegetables grown there; nothing about this paragraph has narrative flow and the book is made up of paragraphs just like it. Further to my complaint about specific details: Hannah must have read that the French were reduced to repurposing old material into clothing because in two different places she writes that Vianne has made a shirt or a pair of pants out of an old shower curtain. Why mention the shower curtain twice?
And I hated all the big dramatic moments (and here are the spoilers): When Vianne is asked to write out the list of “undesirables” for Beck and he reminds her to put her best friend Rachel's name down – this is hardly a betrayal as the Communists and Jews were well known anyway (so I can't imagine why Beck made Vianne write it, other than as an act of control that we're not supposed to suspect Beck of anyway). When Beck warns that Rachel and her children shouldn't be at home the next day, and suddenly Rachel has false papers to cross into Free France, and Sarah is gunned down in the forest, and Vianne hides them in the barn for one night, escorting Rachel and Ari back home on the very day that Beck told them to be away: all that happened in one day? And, in the end, they didn't heed Beck's warning? I didn't believe that Vianne could pass off Ari as a nephew from Nice to the villagers who would have seen him queuing up or attending school with his real mother every day of his life; I hated that Isabelle's father mouthed “I love you” to her (for the first time ever!) as he was being dragged to the firing squad; I hated that Antoine could just decide to run away from his POW camp – after how many years of mistreatment and malnutrition? – and walk back home to France, and worse, that “for some reason she couldn't explain”, Vianne would be compelled to go running into town barefoot to find her missing husband standing there. No no no.
Here's the one thing I did like: I liked the technique of meeting one of the sisters in the present day – old and dying and thinking about the past – and the reader needing to hold on 'til the end to discover whether it's Vianne or Isabelle who survived to old age. (But if I could add a complaint even here, it's that I wish there had been an explanation for why a French patriot and her husband would have emigrated to America; just a line would have made me happy.)
In the end, I think my biggest complaint would be that this didn't feel like Kristin Hannah's story to tell: she reduced an important historical subject to lightweight chick-lit and nothing about it rang true or essential. I think that at our point in history, an author should only write about WWII if she has a little-known historical fact to explore (I didn't love the book Sarah's Key but I did appreciate what Tatiana de Rosnay did to shine a light on the Vel' d'Hiv Roundup; an event that gets mentioned in passing in The Nightingale) or if she thinks that she can, once and for all, capture the essence of the times (and if a reader is looking for what the exodus from Paris was really like, or an exploration of the presumed decency of the early Nazi occupiers, or the experience of the early freedom fighters, Suite Française was written by a woman as those events were actually happening; made more compelling by the fact that the author, Irène Némirovsky, was a Jew who wouldn't survive Auschwitz). The Nightingale isn't a detailed look at the role women played in the French Resistance or a nuanced exploration of the experience of typical French citizens; it's two characters with miserable childhoods who climb to the heights of noble self-sacrifice, and inserting these women into the horrors of war felt like a shortcut to emotion; cheap and mawkish. Perhaps that would be a forgivable concept if I hadn't disliked the writing line-by-line, but dislike it I did, and forgive it I won't.
This is a very popular book, and although I don't care if I'm an outlier in my annoyance, I do feel bad that I rated a book two stars when Laura gave it five: it's hard to dislike a book so aggressively (and say so) when it was loved by someone I love. As a counterpoint, this is Lolo's review:
I will start by saying that I thought about giving this book 4 stars, and if 4.5 were an option I would have marked it that, but my issue is really with the writing itself and not the story, and in the end I don’t feel the book deserves a demotion because of (my) issues with, at times, unimaginative prose and repetitive vocabulary. Overall, I was compelled and captivated.
This was one of those books that, going in, I knew was going to be difficult and emotional. A WWII story set during the German occupation of France involving estranged sisters, each fighting the war in her own way – how could it not be? One sister is a wife, mother and best friend to her Jewess neighbor, with her husband imprisoned in a German POW camp and German soldiers billeted in her house; struggling to maintain her home, her daughter’s innocence, her humanity, empathy and ultimately her life. The other is a rebellious, impetuous teenager, estranged from her family and entirely unable to sit idly by as the war unfolds around them. Both have a tenuous relationship with their father and attempt to understand each other – a rich ingredient list for an emotional saga and it didn’t disappoint. The story was well told and developed at a good pace, letting us experience along with the main characters, the growing despair and hopelessness of the French citizens under the Germans, as well as the desire by most to resist total subjugation in whatever way possible. It was very easy to put myself in either of the sisters’ shoes, to feel their constant fear, live their agonizingly difficult choices and to ask myself, what would I have done? Could I have been as brave as either of them?
Because this was a story about those who were left behind it gave me perspective that I hadn’t considered as deeply before. We have much opportunity to envision how it may have been for the soldiers on the front in direct combat, but there are not as many stories, movies, etc., about the other battles that were fought by the women, children and seniors behind the lines at the same time. This is not to diminish in any way the sacrifices and hardship undergone by those young men and common soldiers, but more to underscore how absolutely insidious the war was – no one was left unaffected.
There is subject matter for books and movies that is sure to score more emotional bullseyes than others and WWII Europe, especially in any German-occupied setting, is one of those. The fact that I am a wife and mother, with a daughter of a similar age to that of the main character’s, as well as a sister, made it VERY easy for me to relate. I have, however, read stories and seen movies that didn’t resonate with me nearly as much as this one did and I was wiping away tears as I finished (not something I frequently do). I am truly thankful I can only imagine.And wouldn't the world be a boring place if we all agreed on everything?
