Ray Kingfisher

Near the end of her days, a terminally ill holocaust survivor travels back to Germany to lay to rest the memories that have haunted her life. Susannah was a teenager when the war ended and the British soldiers shut down the prison camp. Although she was free those memories and nightmares have tortured her for 65 years. They have become part of her very being and she can not let go of a past that is embedded in her soul and effected every aspect of her life from her shopping habits to her marriage, to the way she has raised her children. This was a heart wrenching read. Have tissues near by.

I received an advance copy for review… (mais)

This book is difficult for me to review because I have such mixed feelings about it. The book uses a contemporary setting, event and time as a vehicle for actually telling a story about the Holocaust, and herein lies the first problem. The characters and situations portrayed in the contemporary setting lack authenticity. As characters, they are not credible. The development of their characters is too shallow, too incomplete to really know much about them. When the author attempts to make it seem as if he intended for that to be the case by explaining their behaviors in the last chapters of the book, his explanation is again too superficial for credibility.
While Diane’s character is dealt with in the final chapters, the character of Brad, the schmuck who tolerated her for years, is not amplified. He has put up with too much to be a realistic character, even IF there were a reasonable explanation for Diane’s behavior.
The scenes in the Nazi Death Camps are vivid, detailed, lengthy nod overwrought. While at first, they generate the kind of revulsion in the reader that the author intended, they drag on for so long that empathy and sympathy are difficult to maintain, and I found myself thinking, “OK. I get it. Move on.”
In creating these situations, however, the author has also developed moral tension, something found in far too few modern novels.
Both of the two main characters are forced to make moral choices, one much worse and more fundamental than the other. The novel portrays them each wrestling briefly with their moral decisions before making them. Since the real central theme of the book deals with moral dilemma and difficult choices, there should have been more attention paid to the struggles the consciences of the two characters had. They each resolve their moral challenge too quickly and with far too little moral introspection.
While the ending of the novel deals with what each did to face his lifelong
moral turmoil and the consequences of the moral choices each had made while in the death camps, even in that portrayal, the struggles lacked depth and failed to elicit poignancy.
William Faulkner, when accepting his Nobel Prize, said, “Good literature portrays the human heart in conflict with itself,” which is really an excellent description of what “moral conflict” means. This book had an opportunity to delve into that conflict but chose instead to only give us only a snapshot of it.
… (mais)