This book is beautiful, horrifying and a must read. It is a WWII story with two main characters—a young blind French girl who flees with her brilliant father, a locksmith for the Parisian Museum of Natural History, from the occupied French capital to outlying Saint-Malo, and an orphaned German child prodigy who gets caught up in the Nazi war machine which slowly crushes the light in him. Marie-Laure lives in worlds created by her doting father, but when he is taken from her and she […]
An archaeological dig into suburban life, teenage angst, and death
A startling, depressing, funny, painful glimpse into teenaged angst, The Virgin Suicides is Eugenides’ first novel and well-written but not a comfortable read. If you expect deep psychological insights into the phenomenon of suicide, you’ll be disappointed. Instead, the author reflects on adolescence, loss, regret, and the all too swift passage of time. One learns right from the beginning that the five teenaged daughters of the Lisbon family have all killed themselves, and with that horrifying fact now out in the open, the author proceeds […]
A book about the American character and the ties that bind
Thompson opened up an unfamiliar world for me inside my very own country, the world of the mid-West where change comes more slowly … but inexorably. Jean Thompson’s book reminded me a bit of Jonathan Franzen’s The Corrections in that it offers a long view of a mid-western family’s trials and tribulations. And yet Thompson treats her characters with the poignancy and compassion that real, if flawed, people deserve, while Franzen’s characters were too often caricaturized and mocked for my taste. The Ericksons are a […]
Totalitarianism, up close and personal in post-Mao China
The Vagrants has got to be one of the grimmest novels I’ve read this year, and yet it is a book I wouldn’t hesitate to recommend. The author grew up in Beijing of the late 1970s, the tumultuous post-Mao period in a China which had emerged from the horrific Cultural Revolution without plans to replace it with anything positive. The population was splintered between those whose humanity had been virtually destroyed by the bludgeon of Maoist doctrine, those who were struggling to enter the modern […]
Sex, Murder and Political Intrigue in war-time Paris
This is the latest in the series by Paul Grossman about the famous and highly respected German homicide detective Willi Kraus. Over the course of Grossman’s several earlier books which I’ve reviewed, the thuggish fringe National Socialist movement grows into the terrifying Nazi juggernaut which destroys the Germany Kraus has known and loved, and soon drives German Jews—himself and his family included—into exile. As one of the last to flee before all escape hatches were slammed shut, the widowed Kraus arrives in Paris without belongings, […]
Horror Story on the Eve of Hitler’s Takeover
Grossman returns with a prequel to his horrifying The Sleepwalkers, which I’ve reviewed earlier. In Children of Wrath, the respected Berlin homicide detective and decorated WWI veteran Willi Kraus is just starting to feel the effects of the rising tide of anti-Semitism. It is 1929, and Hitler is still largely viewed as a vulgar upstart by the self-absorbed political aristocracy, but his power is nonetheless growing as the Great Depression begins to ravage the war-weary German economy. The Kripo, the bureau of criminal investigation where […]
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