Scan barcode
wanderingbookwormsf's review
challenging
dark
emotional
informative
sad
tense
slow-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Plot
- Strong character development? It's complicated
4.0
gh7's review
2.0
All my instincts were haranguing me to abandon this around page 40 but my stupid stubbornness to finish what I begin triumphed again…
The novel begins with Amara, a Florentine journalist, on a train. She is about to visit the Holocaust museum at Auschwitz. She begins reading letters sent to her by her childhood soulmate, an Austrian Jewish boy whose parents, in an inexplicable fit of nationalism, left Florence and returned to Vienna after Hitler invades. The first big problem is these letters, sent from the Lodz ghetto. There’s no artistry whatsoever in their composition. They’re like a wholly impersonal bombardment of research. Maraini writes about the Holocaust as if she is the first person ever to do so and we, as readers, should be shocked by details we’ve actually heard a hundred times before. If a novel is to be truly moving there has to be a convincing imaginative identification with its characters and their predicament, not merely a stockpiling of shocking detail delivered by a talking head. It’s like the difference between being told there’s a famine in Somalia and being shown images of a mother tending to her starving child. We need to see the humanity in the suffering to be truly moved by it. This is a novel of constructs rather than characters.
Soon the unsuccessful 1956 uprising in Budapest takes centre stage and remains there for most of the novel. I didn’t understand how that connects to the Holocaust. Again there was an awful lot more telling than showing.
It ends with an Auschwitz survivor, another talking head, telling us what it was like in the camp and this I found distasteful. It wasn’t shocking or moving; it was just irritating in its righteous presumption.
There were glimmers that Maraini has interesting things to say; unfortunately though not about the Holocaust or the uprising in Budapest.
The novel begins with Amara, a Florentine journalist, on a train. She is about to visit the Holocaust museum at Auschwitz. She begins reading letters sent to her by her childhood soulmate, an Austrian Jewish boy whose parents, in an inexplicable fit of nationalism, left Florence and returned to Vienna after Hitler invades. The first big problem is these letters, sent from the Lodz ghetto. There’s no artistry whatsoever in their composition. They’re like a wholly impersonal bombardment of research. Maraini writes about the Holocaust as if she is the first person ever to do so and we, as readers, should be shocked by details we’ve actually heard a hundred times before. If a novel is to be truly moving there has to be a convincing imaginative identification with its characters and their predicament, not merely a stockpiling of shocking detail delivered by a talking head. It’s like the difference between being told there’s a famine in Somalia and being shown images of a mother tending to her starving child. We need to see the humanity in the suffering to be truly moved by it. This is a novel of constructs rather than characters.
Soon the unsuccessful 1956 uprising in Budapest takes centre stage and remains there for most of the novel. I didn’t understand how that connects to the Holocaust. Again there was an awful lot more telling than showing.
It ends with an Auschwitz survivor, another talking head, telling us what it was like in the camp and this I found distasteful. It wasn’t shocking or moving; it was just irritating in its righteous presumption.
There were glimmers that Maraini has interesting things to say; unfortunately though not about the Holocaust or the uprising in Budapest.
aldadelicado's review against another edition
4.0
Um dos melhores livros que li sobre o Holocausto. Uma jornalista italiana vai em busca de um amigo de infância, judeu que vivia em Viena na época da guerra. Muito bem escrito, tem no entanto passagens que custam muito a ler...
saltydough's review against another edition
adventurous
challenging
dark
emotional
mysterious
reflective
sad
tense
medium-paced
- Strong character development? Yes
- Loveable characters? No
- Diverse cast of characters? Yes
- Flaws of characters a main focus? No
2.0
This book, in my opinion, attempts to hold together too many plot threads at once. Amara, the main character, is sent to Eastern Europe during the Cold War, ostensibly to cover what is going on there as a journalist for a small Italian publication. This premise is what originally drew me into the book, as I was interested in hearing about the Cold War from the point of view of a character living through it. However, I was disappointed to find that a large majority of the book is spent on her search for her childhood friend/lover, Emanuele. This also leads to many revelations about World War II, which, while somewhat interesting, were not what I had hoped for from this book. When the author finally gets around to Cold War issues, the events take up about 50 pages and seem not to have much consequence for our narrator other than that she is unable to continue her search for Emanuele. This scattered focus results in an unsatisfying and unresolved ending, with our main character in even worse shape than she started. Add that to some awkward wording, probably as a result of translation difficulties, and I was quite disappointed by this book. There were some times when I was genuinely invested, as well as some genuinely beautiful turns of phrase, but it was overall somewhat of a slog to get through.
More...