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A review by gh7
Train to Budapest by Dacia Maraini
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.