It is no overstatement to compare Swedish author Steve Sem-Sandberg’s epic novel about the people in the Lodz ghetto during World War II to Tolstoy’s War and Peace, published almost one hundred fifty years earlier. The real life dramas which the book illustrates, the memorable characters, the carefully developed themes which Sem-Sandburg treats in new ways, and the magnitude of the horrors easily make this book the equal of Tolstoy’s epic. The nature of the subject matter, of course, precludes any hint of romanticism here, but Sem-Sandburg is so good at varying scenes involving a series of fully human, repeating characters, that I cannot imagine any reader not becoming fully engaged with them, even though their stories have been created from piles of archival records, lists, and photographs and obviously have no happy endings. Beautifully written to memorialize the people of the ghetto, rather than the horrors of the Holocaust itself, this book is an awe-inspiring literary achievement.
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Claudia Hampton, an iconoclastic, sometimes imperious, often maddening, and completely liberated seventy-six-year-old woman, lies in a nursing home awaiting death—very reluctantly. Having earned her living as a reporter during the Cairo campaign in World War II and later as a popular historian, she sees no reason why she should not continue her work as she awaits death. ‘Let me contemplate myself within my [own] context,” she says, “everything and nothing. The history of the world as selected by Claudia: fact and fiction, myth and evidence, images and documents.” As she fades in and out of consciousness (her nurse wondering aloud to the doctor, “Was she someone?”), she plans her story for her usual readers, indicating that she will omit the narrative but “flesh it out; give it life and color, add the screams and the rhetoric…The question is, shall it or shall it not be linear history? I’ve always thought a kaleidoscopic view might be an interesting heresy. Shake the tube and see what comes out…There is no chronology inside my head. I am composed of a myriad Claudias who spin and mix and part like sparks of sunlight on water..there is no sequence, everything happens at once.” By turns humorous, thoughtful, satiric, wonderfully philosophical, and consummately literary in its observations and allusions, this novel is an absolute treasure, one that will appeal to every lover of serious themes presented in new ways.
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A novel which has received rave advance reviews for Amy Waldman, a New York Times reporter and bureau chief turned novelist, The Submission posits a series of “what ifs” and then lets the turmoil unfold. In the aftermath of 9/11, with hundreds of families trying to cope with the magnitude of their loss and the entire country trying to cope with their loss of innocence, a competition is held to design the memorial which will be constructed at Ground Zero. Representatives to the selection committee are chosen from all levels of society, including a woman who has lost her husband in the attack, and their task is to choose the best design from all of the “blind” submissions, designs lacking all personal references, including the name of the architect to avoid favoritism. In the final tumultuous voting between two completely different designs, Claire Burwell, the woman widowed by the attack, favors the design of a garden, a place of peach and contemplation, with the names of the victims on the walls around the garden. Other committee members are swayed by Ariana, a famed sculptor, who favors a stark, monumental creation called “The Void,” which Claire finds cold. When the envelope naming the architect is opened, they discover that they have chosen Mohammad Khan, an American, to design their memorial.
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This tiny book, closer to a short story than to a novella, was the last piece of fiction by author Joseph Roth (1894 – 1939), and was published posthumously in 1940. As such, it becomes a particularly poignant study of Roth’s last days as he waited for the death he knew was coming. The Leviathan his allegorical last story, features an observant but illiterate Jew living in Progrody in the Ukraine who has become the premier dealer of coral jewelry for the farmers’ wives in the community and surrounding area. Nissen Piczenik respects his customers, entertains them when they come to town to see his wares, and offers good corals at good prices. Nissen has never left Progrody and has always yearned to see the ocean where his corals live, and when a young sailor comes home on leave from Odessa, he persuades the sailor to take him with him when returns to port. At home, he learns that a new coral seller has set up shop in the next town, and when he meets this seller, he discovers why this merchant has been able to undercut him in prices and lead his former customers to believe that Nissen has been cheating them. Nissen’s world dramatically changes as he comes to know the new coral seller, and one day he makes a fateful decision which changes the world as he knows it. Allegorical, with clear parallels to the author’s own life.
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In this exciting and rather “old-fashioned” prize-winner from 1975, newly reprinted by Bloomsbury, Thomas Williams creates a novel about fiction writing and its relationship to the “immensities” with which every human being must contend, for better or worse, during his lifetime. Telling the story of a novelist who is writing a novel in which a character is also writing a novel, Williams creates, first, Aaron Benham, a professor at a small New England college in the 1970s. Williams tells the reader at the outset that the story Aaron Benham is creating is “a simple story of seduction, rape, madness and murder—the usual human preoccupations,” but that is a misleading summary. Aaron’s novel, set in the 1940s, is actually a study of very real characters dealing with their lives, their expectations, and the world as they see it within the microcosm of a small college. Constantly playing with fiction vs. reality, fiction as part of reality, fiction as an alternative to reality, and the special fictions one creates for love, the author writes a powerful and dramatic novel, filled with events which keep the reader constantly involved with his characters, even when they are behaving very badly. Powerful and unforgettable.
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