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Liked It “I enjoyed Hansen's fictional entwining of the death of five nuns aboard the Deutschland and Gerard Manley Hopkins's poetic reawakening. While at times the fiction reads a little too much like plain old reportage, the stories are deeply affecting, and Hansen's considerable abilities as a writer...” see full review » see other reviews » |
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“I enjoyed Hansen's fictional entwining of the death of five nuns aboard the Deutschland and Gerard Manley Hopkins's poetic reawakening. While at times the fiction reads a little too much like plain old reportage, the stories are deeply affecting, and Hansen's considerable abilities as a writer only enhance that quality. I found the final pages most compelling, as the already-revealed fate of the nuns collides with a storm assaulting Hopkins himself. Very nicely done. Reading this has inspired me to get on the stick with other Hansen titles, most notably, "The Assassination of Jesse James etc."”
Jamie C wrote this review Tuesday, August 25 2009. ( reply | permalink ) Was this review helpful? Yes | No
“For the reader that is seeking an account of history this book gives you that. The knowledge one acquires through this book of what is was like to be a nun or priest during this period is fascinating. I would recommend this book! ”
CAH wrote this review Sunday, April 26 2009. ( reply | permalink ) Was this review helpful? Yes | No
“With Exiles, Ron Hansen tells the story of a notorious shipwreck that prompted Gerard Manley Hopkins to break years of “elected silence” with an outpouring of dazzling poetry.
In December 1875 the steamship Deutschland left Bremen, bound for England and then America. On board were five young nuns who, exiled by Bismarck’s laws against Catholic religious orders, were going to begin their lives anew in Missouri. Early one morning, the ship ran aground in the Thames and more than sixty lives were lost—including those of the five nuns.
Hopkins was a Jesuit seminarian in Wales, and he was so moved by the news of the shipwreck that he wrote a grand poem about it, his first serious work since abandoning a literary career at Oxford to become a priest. He too would die young, an exile from the literary world. But as Hansen’s gorgeously written account of Hopkins’s life makes clear, he fulfilled his calling.
Combining a thrilling tragedy at sea with the seeming shipwreck of Hopkins’s own life, Exiles joins Hansen’s Mariette in Ecstasy (called “an astonishingly deft and provocative novel” by The New York Times) as a novel that dramatizes the passionate inner search of religious life and makes it accessible to us in the way that only great art can.F HANSEN”
Independence Public Library New Fiction Books wrote this review Thursday, February 12 2009. ( reply | permalink ) Was this review helpful? Yes | No
“I almost quit reading this "not really a novel" because the opening struggles to find its feet as a blended story. Hansen juxtaposes the unhappy life of Jesuit Gerard Manley Hopkins with the story of The Wreck of the Deutschland and the five German nuns who perished. Ultimately, the parallel examination is satisfying and illuminates the poetry beautifully.”
Helen G wrote this review Friday, November 28 2008. ( reply | permalink ) Was this review helpful? Yes | No
“One cold night in December 1875, the German steamship Deutschland ran aground in the Thames estuary in England, and more than sixty people died, including five young nuns who, exiled by Bismarck’s laws against Catholic religious orders, were on their way to begin a new work in Missouri.
Gordon H wrote this review Friday, August 29 2008. ( reply | permalink ) Was this review helpful? Yes | No
This tragedy captured the imagination of a young Jesuit named Gerard Manley Hopkins, and he began working on a long poem, “The Wreck of the Deutschland,” that would help catapult him long after his death into the upper echelons of British poets.
In “Exiles” (his seventh novel), Ron Hansen imagines the lives of the five nuns and Hopkins and draws on themes of faith and identity. He paints both sets of characters as exiles in their different ways as they struggled to follow their vocations.
As he did in his first two novels, “Desperadoes” and “The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford,” Hansen combines meticulous historical research with his novelist’s skills at creating character and drama. Clearly he is most absorbed with Hopkins, the sensitive and eccentric seminarian who abandoned his literary career to pursue the priesthood, to whom Hansen gives the most pages.
Yet his accounts of the five nuns, about which “very little is known,” he writes in “A Note on Sources,” are where the novel comes most alive. As readers we are drawn to these obscure German women who come out of ordinary homes yet are drawn to the religious life. And we are moved as they face their deaths on the ship when “forty-four passengers and twenty crew … died between five in the morning on December 6th and sunrise on December 7th.” (Sixty-nine passengers and eighty-six crew were rescued.)
Perhaps we identify more readily with these simple women. But Hansen, I suspect, identifies more with Hopkins, the literary genius whose talent went unrecognized until after his death at age 45. And his life was full of sadness. At his ordination, which was for him the most important day of his life, no one from his family came. He had left the Anglican faith of his family and converted to Catholicism. Only when he was on his death bed did his parents finally visit him. By then he was in Ireland, teaching at University College.
For Hopkins, the struggle between his vocation as a priest and his gifts as a poet was lifelong. At the former he received little affirmation, and the latter he kept hidden from all but a few friends, and these only recognized that his poems were difficult and would not be popular.
Once another seminarian looks at the poem Hopkins is working on (“The Wreck of the Deutschland”), and he fails to understand Hopkins’ elaborate use of meter. Hopkins says: “I shan’t publish it. The journals will think it barbarous.” The other asks, “Why write it then?” and Hopkins replies, “Why pray?”
In that short scene, Hansen captures not only Hopkins’ struggle but the struggle of many artists who feel compelled to do what they do, even if no one acknowledges it.
Hansen’s writing shines, as is usual, and his use of nouns as verbs is present here, though not as much as in his first two novels. For example, he describes waves, “the swell’s comb morseling into fine string and tassel before bursting on the rocky spurs of the cove and breaking into white bushes of foam.”
By the end we grieve Hopkins’ short life and sense of exile as much as we do the nuns’ deaths. And this novel sends us to the poems, to those pioneering works that altered our sense of language and its possibilities. (Hansen includes a copy of “The Wreck of the Deutschland,” all 35 stanzas.) I went out and purchased a copy of Hopkins’ poems and prose.
In an epilogue, Hansen records how Hopkins became known long after his death in 1889, to the point where the great British literary critic F.R. Leavis wrote in 1932 that Hopkins “is likely to prove, for our time and the future, the only influential poet of the Victorian age, and he seems to me the greatest.”
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“I adored this book and the depictions of the five nuns. This gave me a greater appreciation of Gerard Manley Hopkins and his muse. A must-read for poets.”
Queenbeedl wrote this review Wednesday, August 6 2008. ( reply | permalink ) Was this review helpful? Yes | No
“Definitely not for everyone but if you ever heard of Gerard Manley Hopkins or studied his poetry, not to be missed.”
Sandy L wrote this review Sunday, August 3 2008. ( reply | permalink ) Was this review helpful? Yes | No
“A fabulous book about my favorite poet - Gerard Manley Hopkins. It is a fictionalized account of his life and the lives of five nuns that were drowned aboard the ship Deutchland when it ran aground off the coast of England in the 1870's. It gives a fascinating picture of what his life was like as he studied to become a priest and as he wrote his amazing poetry - considered "odd" in the late 1800's, and not really discovered and appreciated until years after he died. I would recommend this book, and his poetry, to anyone, but especially to people of faith. This is my favorite book of the year so far.”
Ashlie R wrote this review Monday, July 28 2008. ( reply | permalink ) Was this review helpful? Yes | No“An amazing novelization of the tale of the sinking of the "Deutschland" and the death of five nuns who are on board. It is the story, as well of Gerard Manly Hopkins and the poem he wrote inspired by that. Excellent tale well told.”
Mike Mather wrote this review Tuesday, June 10 2008. ( reply | permalink ) Was this review helpful? Yes | No
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