Set at Tamarack State Hospital for tuberculosis patients in July, 1916, Andrea Barrett’s sensitive and moving novel creates an intimate atmosphere in which the patients become a microcosm for the attitudes, social pressures, and political movements of the country at large. Consisting primarily of immigrants who have been isolated from their families, the inhabitants are essentially alone, dealing with their illness on the strength of the values they have brought to the sanatorium.
Barrett’s sensitivity to the time period, with the growing labor movement, war fever, and medical advances (especially the mysterious X-ray) is also reflected in her attention to characterization as each character asks “Who am I, and how do I make a life that is meaningful?” Though the novel is set in 1916, its themes are universal, and its characters’ problems are timeless. Beautifully paced and emotionally moving, this novel adds complexity to the themes which Barrett has developed in previous novels.
Read Full Post »
Written in 1994, and set in the small (fictional) German town of Burgdorf from 1915 – 1951, this compassionate novel centers on Trudi Montag, a bright, observant, and articulate young woman who is also a zwerg, a dwarf. Born to a mentally ill mother who dies when Trudi is three, Trudi is at first bewildered by her small size, hanging from doorframes to “stretch” her arms and legs, praying that she will become more like other children, and believing that if she is truly good, God will help her. Trudi’s experience of her own “otherness” makes her a sympathetic friend and active supporter of the local Jews, especially with the rise of fascism, and Hegi evokes great power by connecting the overwhelming Nazi horrors with the life of one small person in one small community. Through Trudi, Burgdorf’s citizens come alive–those who befriend her and those who reject her, those who support her efforts to help the Jews and those who don’t, and those who pity her and those who are inspired by her.
Read Full Post »
Maisie Dobbs is a survivor, having lied about her age at seventeen and enlisted in the nursing corps, where she served in France in the final, horrific days of World War I. Now working as a psychologist/investigator in London, Maisie stays busy to avoid dealing with her demons. and nightmares. Three mysteries unfold simultaneously. Avril Jarvis, age 13, is arrested for the murder of her “uncle” when she is found with a knife in her hand and blood on her clothes. Penniless, she has no counsel until Maisie takes a case involving Sir Cecil Lawton, whom she persuades to represent Avril as part of her fee. In addition, Priscilla Partridge, one of Maisie’s dear friends from the Ambulance Corps, has also begged her to try to find where the third of her brothers to die was buried in France.
Read Full Post »
On a train going from Austria to the eastern front in 1916, [Franz Kretzschmar’s father] had played a life-or-death chess game with another man and had “won.” The winner became “Viktor Kretzschmar” and lived out the war as pointman on the Salzburg-Munich train line; the loser became Thadeus Dreyer and faced almost certain death in battle. As in this chess game, Padilla’s characters move like pawns throughout the novel, often being overtaken by events and supplanted by other men as part of the grand, overall “game” of life. Padilla raises thought-provoking questions about the nature of selfhood here, as men appropriate each other’s names, and hope, ultimately, to change their destinies by living someone else’s life. The reader must constantly question whether each character is who he says he is, and whether he really is who we think he is.
Read Full Post »
Although most Americans know that World War I began in 1914, far fewer know that while that war was being fought in Europe, a million Armenians were being killed in a long-term genocide conducted by the Turks. In a series of massacres over a period of more than twenty years, most notably between 1894 and 1915, the Armenians were forced from their land, marched across barren plains under deplorable conditions, and subjected to depredations from which death was often a merciful release. Author Judith Claire Mitchell creates a fascinating plot which brings to life the efforts by Armenians in Europe and America to address the wrongs done to them by bringing the Turkish leaders of the massacres to justice, either legal or ad hoc. The novel is fast paced and compulsive reading, and it brings attention to a subject which has only rarely been the subject of novels.
Read Full Post »
