Devastated by the sudden death of her father when she is in her early thirties, author Helen Macdonald finds herself lost, overwhelmed, and dealing with a “kind of madness.” She and her father were especially close. They had loved walking for hours in the woods of Hampshire, and she had always wanted to become a falconer. Her parents, sympathetic, had even allowed her, after much pleading, to accompany a group of falconers hunting with goshawks in the field when she was only twelve. In this brilliantly described and vivid depiction of the meaning of life and death, Macdonald connects with readers in unique ways as Macdonald trains a huge goshawk to come to her hand, hunt, and live a relatively wild life, and it’s hard to imagine anyone who will not be changed by this incredibly moving work: “In my time with Mabel, I’ve learned how you feel more human once you have known…what it is like to be not. And I have learned, too, the danger that comes in mistaking the wildness we give a thing for the wildness that animates it…Their inhumanity…has nothing to do with us at all.”
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Posted in 6-2015 Reviews, Autobiography/Memoir, Book Club Suggestions, Germany, Historical, Non-fiction, Poland, Psychological study, Social and Political Issues, Sweden on Feb 27th, 2015
Imagining his father waiting at a train station outside of Auschwitz, where he has just been liberated, Swedish author Goran Rosenberg, the child of two Jewish Holocaust survivors from Poland, has decided to begin his memoir about his father’s life with his father’s journey to Sweden, the place where he plans to live but where he knows no one. There, his father plans to close the book on his earlier life in Poland and his incarceration at Auschwitz and settle down to make a new life. In his early twenties and weighing just over eighty pounds when he arrives, his father David finds and then arranges for his future wife Hala to join him after a two-year separation, then begins his family and their lives as survivors of the Holocaust in a completely foreign environment. Goran Rosenberg’s memoir, monumental in its insights into post-war survival, clear and unequivocal in its presentation of facts, artistic and beautifully written, and emotionally involving for the reader, makes the Rosenberg family, with its difficulties and its triumphs, more than the story of one family, however much we want them to succeed. Through this memoir, Goran Rosenberg makes them symbolic of all the survivors of this terrible war as they try also to survive their survivorhood.
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In the opening salvo of this riotous and darkly humorous collection of interconnected vignettes, French author Yasmina Reza sets the scene for her exploration of love and marriage, family and home, romantic satisfaction and dysfunction in modern France. The often huge gap between what people, including the reader, see from the outside and what the characters are really thinking creates opportunities for great irony and delightfully witty exchanges as the author, also a successful dramatist, reveals her characters through small, everyday details and animated conversations. Each of the twenty vignettes is limited to six or seven pages, and the author’s witty and rapid-fire presentations lead to each vignette having its own punch line and thematic development. The pure delight of reading Reza’s wonderfully controlled and lively prose (artfully translated by John Cullen), grows as the reader discovers that the characters in one sketch often appear in other sketches, too, leading to a broad picture of several families, their friends, and their lovers, as seen from several different points of view. Robert Toscano, whom we meet in the opening scene, and his wife Odile, for example, each have two separate vignettes, and reappear in each other’s lives, while Odile’s family – her father, mother, aunt, and Robert and Odile’s children – also have their own points of view which broaden the focus. Ultimately, each sketch becomes an integral part of the overall depiction of time, place, and character, and this collection begins to resemble a novel.
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Four years before there was a Roberto Rossellini in her life, Ingrid Bergman experienced a period of unexpected and intense happiness with Hungarian photographer Robert Capa. Their affair was conducted in Europe, where Bergman managed to keep it quiet from the press, her studio, and her husband, and it is only now gaining wide notice with the publication of this biographical novel. Robert Capa had achieved fame for his uncompromising and heroic photographs of the Spanish Civil War in the late 1930s, the Chinese resistance to the Japanese invasion in the early 1940s, and the Magnificent Eleven photographs he made of the D-Day landings in 1944. Addicted to danger and exhilarated by the high drama of battle, Capa would seem on the surface to have little in common with the coolly elegant Ingrid Bergman, the Swedish Academy Award-winner famous for the subtlety of her acting performances and her quiet, lady-like demeanor. Nevertheless, these two people found solace with each other in the aftermath of the war, as each was alone and dealing with private demons. Capa, now out of work, was wandering Europe, drinking too much and gambling, while Bergman was traveling and entertaining the troops following the war’s end. Long dominated and controlled by her husband of eight years, Petter Lindstrom, who managed her career and every aspect of her life, Bergman was able, on this trip, to feel complete liberation for the first time, since Lindstrom remained at home in Hollywood caring for their daughter Pia.
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Greek author Fotini Tsalikoglou, in her first novel to be translated into English, introduces a man we come to know as Jonathan, along with the first of his family’s many mysteries. Jonathan has just boarded a plane from New York City to Athens, and while sitting next to an empty seat in the plane, he speaks to it as if it were “Amalia.” He is remembering an unnamed woman who dragged him, as a small child, to museums all over New York to see Greek statues and pediments, but who never had any interest in going to Greece herself. He is puzzled because, despite this behavior toward Greek art, she was clearly “revolted by her country.” Her name was Lale Andersen, a name she chose when she changed it from the original, and she was Jonathan’s “mutant mother.” What follows is a complex conversation in which two people, Jonathan and Amalia, through changing times and places, discuss with each other their shared childhoods and differing memories. The novel jumps around without warning, as he comments to himself about the plane trip and his decision to travel to Greece, interspersing observations in the present with memories from his past, including the sometimes bizarre events which have made a lasting impression upon him from his childhood, including one in which he believes he has met his father, a vagrant. Psychological and intense.
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