What I Loved

What I Loved was this book. No question, it’s one of my favourite for 2010. It was intense, emotional, exhausting, sublime and depressing. The writing – magnificent. The characters – realistic and resonating. The grief was so realistic and draining that at times I could only read a few pages before having to put the book down and digest the raw turmoil that the characters were enduring. Rather than giving anything more away, I thought that I would just leave you with a few of quotes from the novel which have stayed with me.

For me, I was taken in by this novel from its opening:
“Yesterday I found Violet’s letters to Bill. They were hidden between the pages of one of his books and came tumbling out and fell to the floor. I had known about the letters for years, but neither Bill nor Violet had ever told me what was in them. What they did tell me was that minutes after reading the fifth and last letter, Bill changed his mind about his marriage to Lucille, walked out the door of the building on Greene Street, and headed straight for Violet’s apartment in the East Village … When I put the letters down, I knew that I would start writing this book today.”
It is this paradigm that cloaks the novel and through its telling the background to this moment becomes painfully clear.

I won’t spoil the story, but a quote from later in the book sums up the intensity of the themes:
“equating horror with the inhuman has always struck me as convenient but fallacious, if only because I was born into a century that should have ended such talk for good. For me, the lamp became the sign not of the inhuman but of the all-too-human, the lapse or break that occurs in people when empathy is gone, when others aren’t a part of us anymore but are turned into things. There is genuine irony in the fact that my empathy for Mark vanished at the moment when I understood that he had not a shred of that quality in himself.”

This book gave me goosebumps. I am in awe of the magnificence of this prose and impressed by the fact that this author clearly expects her readers to savour every word of the text, to mull over each sentence and to revel in the grace of this novel… “what was unwritten then is inscribed into what I call myself. The longer I live, the more convinced I am that when I say ‘I’, I am really saying ‘we’…”

I will definitely be reading more of this author’s work!

Buy this book.

Read something fascinating about the author.

Not Me

In between things, I have read Lavigne’s book Not Me. The premise of this book fascinated me: son tending to father stricken with Alzheimer’s discovers that father might not be the noble holocaust survivor that he believes him to be, that he is in fact a Nazi war criminal. As I said, fascinating! On many levels this novel worked… The relationship between the father and son is fraught with all sorts of guilt and this is neatly amplified by the son’s relationship with his own son and, in fact, his ex-wife. The characters’ relationship with Judaism is also interesting and illustrates some of the complexities faced by second generation survivors. However, the main thrust of this novel is the narrative found hidden in a series of journals supposedly left to the son and written by the father. These journals expose the father as a Nazi war criminal, a cog in the Nazi war machine and as a twisted and at first, immoral human being. However, as the story unfolds, it becomes clear that the author’s message is that humanity in its very nature is a complicated and layered beast, that people can change and that we should never underestimate the bonds of love and the lengths that ordinary people will go to in order to defend and protect those bonds.

However, while this should be a great book, it falls short in many central ways. There are far too many loose strands in this narrative – the relationship between the son and his sister is resolved in a way that by its nature requires further exploration. The son, Mikey, as a character is scatty and loose, somewhat deranged in parts without inspiring any empathy from readers. His own connections to those around him are vague. While this might be an element of his character, it works against him for readers do not feel connected to him, and instead of him bearing some sort of hero stance, he mostly comes across as an irritating idiot.

Am I glad I read this one? Yes. It was a most unusual story and has led me to consider morality and humanity from alternate perspectives. I’d be interested to know what others thing?

For a review and discussion of this text, see the link below. Apart from the fact that the author of this link has spelled the son’s name ‘Mickey’ when my version of the text clearly says ‘Mikey’, it’s a good discussion!

interesting review