Unlike the emphatically local, limited in time and space "Brilliant Girlfriend" by Elena Ferrante, "The Nightingale" by Christine Hannah (almost the main American and world bestseller of last year) in the retelling draws on a full-scale epic. World War II, sprawling family drama, the horrors of the Holocaust, the heroism of the Resistance, the experience of healing trauma, both collective and individual - starting in a picturesque French village on the banks of the Loire on a fine August day in 1939, the novel slowly and imposingly rolls to its dramatic denouement, which destined to play out fifty years later, on the coast of windy Oregon.
Kristin Hannah is the award-winning and bestselling author of more than 20 novels including the international blockbuster, The Nightingale, which was named Goodreads Best Historical fiction novel for 2015 and won the coveted People's Choice award for best fiction in the same year. Additionally, it was named a Best Book of the Year by Amazon, iTunes, Buzzfeed, the Wall Street Journal, Paste, and The Week. Her novel, The Great Alone, was also voted as Goodreads best historical novel of the year in 2018.
"The Nightingale" - Rossignol - is the surname of the two main characters, the two sisters Vianna and Isabelle. Early left without a mother and actually abandoned by their father, the girls grow up surprisingly dissimilar: the diffident, timid and fragile older Vianna used to rely on her husband in everything and follow the established rules. Isabelle, young, energetic and mobile, like mercury, is completely different: she acts without having time to think, and says what is in her heart even when it threatens death for herself and her loved ones. Locked in the French hinterland during the German occupation, the sisters, who never had much love for each other, face a difficult choice: risk themselves to save others, or sit in relative safety and see how others sacrifice themselves for the sake of freedom and high ideals.
It would be dishonest not to warn the reader that absolutely all the hypotheses regarding the further development of the plot that he had at this point will come true with maximum accuracy and completeness. Of course, both sisters will make the right choice and, after a little trickery at first, each in her own way will uncompromisingly take the side of good - Isabelle will go to the Resistance, Vianna will save Jewish children. The very first guy Isabel met during the flight from occupied Paris will not only feed the girl with fried rabbit meat (this is with a total shortage of food and in the midst of huge crowds of refugees!), Not only will he not rape and rob her, but will also turn out to be her love for life . Vianna's beloved husband, having endured many torments, will safely return from the POW camp to his wife and daughter. Even the cold, heartless father of girls at the end of his life will repent, ask his daughters for forgiveness and generally turn out to be a hero. German officers are good and humane (unless, of course, they serve in the Gestapo or the SS - those, of course, are complete monsters) and do evil without any pleasure; collaborators can be understood but hard to forgive, and the French love for butter and wine can only be compared with their love for their country and the novels of Victor Hugo. Hanna's characters, if they really rejoice, then "with all their hearts", and if they die, then, of course, with a clear smile on their lips and in the arms of a loved one.
However, despite the total predictability both at the level of plot moves and at the level of details, to call The Nightingale a bad book would be a well-known simplification. Perhaps it would be correct to speak of Christine Hannah's novel as a strong mass product, designed, on the one hand, for enlightenment (the French also fought - well, wow!), And on the other, for a strong emotional response: it is no coincidence that every second review of the novel on the GoodReads site begins with a report on the number of handkerchiefs used in the process of reading. In short, if a year ago you shed a tear over Anthony Dorr's bestseller All the Light We Cannot See, and a few years earlier over John Boyne's The Boy in the Striped Pajamas, then Christine Hannah's The Nightingale is written for you. And yes, you will definitely need handkerchiefs.
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