Recent Reviews
Wunderland by Jennifer Cody Epstein
Jennifer Cody Epstein’s recently released pre-WWII novel Wunderland startles with its power and intimacy. This gripping story helps us understand on a human level how the horrors of WWII happened. Epstein shines a light on the friendship of two German girls and their responses to the Nazi party’s obsessive focus on blood purity and Anti-Semitic fervor. Rather than offer economic, political or military analysis of the rise of Nazism, Epstein’s novel offers us a perch to observe the reactions of Ilse Von Fischer and Renate Bauer to the increasing influence of the Nazis and the escalating brutality toward the Jewish population. One young woman joins the Nazi youth movement and the other is denied. The demise of their friendship serves as a metaphor for the devolution of the once positive relationship between diverse peoples living in Germany.
The novel opens in New York in 1989. Ava Fischer has received a package from her estranged mother’s attorney. The parcel contains her mother’s ashes and a series of letters that Ilse had written, but never sent, to her best friend Renate. Through these letters, Ava learns about her mother’s nefarious wartime activities and gains clarity about her complicated paternity.
After the devastation of the First World War and the resulting depression, Germans feel beaten down and seek both saviors and scapegoats. Ilse and Renate each respond to the chaos and lawlessness differently. When Jewish kids are mocked, denigrated and expelled from schools, Renate and Ilse don’t like the sadistic cruelty, but it doesn’t affect their lives.
In 1933, the year of Hitler’s election, Ilse and Renate are in their early teens living in Bremen, Germany. They are best friends. They wear friendship rings, walk home from school and support each other. By 1938, when random violence and smoldering hatred emerges in their town, they become young women who must choose how they will meet the moment
Ilse is soon seduced by peer pressure and a desire to find a bigger meaning in her life. She joins the NDF, a Hitler youth organization and encourages Renate, to join them as well. In a vivid scene, the German official tells Renate she is ineligible because the German authorities discovered her father’s deceased parents were Jewish. Ilse is already brainwashed, “You can’t join because you’re not a part of the new Germany. You can’t be. I know that’s not your fault, but it’s the truth. We can’t just pretend that it’s not.” Ilse could have expressed outrage, empathy and solidarity with Renate, but she does not. She embraces Hitler’s vision for a new Germany and betrays Renate’s family because of her narcissism, lack of empathy and a growing appetite for cruelty.
Epstein’s shows us through the lives of these young women how contemptuous comments directed at Jews before the war escalated into the horrors of Jewish extermination during the war. She captures the betrayal by the German people of their Jewish neighbors by writing of Ilse’s betrayal of her once dear friend Renate.
Because the novel begins and ends in 1989, there is a sense of hope for Ana. She better understands her mother’s distant personality and her grievous actions as a Nazi propagandist. Though the novel is painful, Epstein has added another dimension to our understanding of how civilized people descended into madness. Ana will eventually make peace with her mother’s past and stop the patterns in the next generation. Given the current invective in our national politics, Wunderland serves as a warning that silence in the face of denigrating and derisive language toward minority groups can lead to violence and tragedy.
Halibut on the Moon by David Vann
This review was published in the San Francisco Examiner
on April 14, 2019
https://www.sfexaminer.com/entertainment/halibut-on-the-moon-evocatively-details-one-mans-descent/
Some books are read for insight and some for the enjoyment of a good story. Award winning author David Vann’s new novel falls in the former category. ‘Halibut on the Moon’ is a difficult story to read yet provides insight and empathy for a man who suffers from mental illness and dreams of suicide. Vann’s fictionalized account of his father’s life is raw and heartbreaking.
When the novel begins, Jim Vann, a 39 year-old dentist, is descending both literally and figuratively. He is landing in San Francisco, California on a flight from Fairbanks, Alaska. His younger brother Gary picks him up at SFO and they drive to Gary’s home in Sebastopol. Knowing of his brother’s depression, Gary has arranged for Jim to see a psychiatrist who prescribes an unnamed medicine and instructs Gary not to leave Jim alone.
The novel follows Gary and Jim as they visit their parents, Jim’s kids and his oldest friend. Part of the novel’s tension derives from how the characters fail to connect with each another. Jim believes that he has come to review the course of his life, and say goodbye before he commits suicide. While Gary believes that Jim has returned to get help and feel the love and support of family. But Jim’s family lacks the ability to understand and address Jim’s illness.
On the surface, Jim’s problems are apparent. He has two ex-wives, two confused children and a $365,000 debt to the IRS. But Jim seems less bothered by these facts than by the intense irrational thoughts that haunt his inner life. He lives in a dark tunnel that light and love rarely reach.
How he arrived in this downward spiral of mental illness is not known; no doubt a storm of factors starting with lousy luck in the genetic lottery. His parents are another unfortunate piece of the puzzle. They are remote, distant and simple. When Gary and Jim arrive at their childhood home on the shores of Clear Lake, Jim’s hostility is apparent. He says to his mother “You look old now, and you’re bigger, and you have that loose neck.” To his father, “Have you been fat that long?” No one engages as they eat lunch. His mother says grace, “Please help my boy Jim. Help guide him and comfort him and make your love clear. Help get us all through this difficult time.” Jim blurts back, “Where do I get this feeling that I’m a piece of shit?”
These family members cannot connect. Jim’s parents believe that his troubles derive from moral shortcomings not a mental illness. When Jim starts a manic rant, Gary exclaims, “All you have to do is stop.” Jim wishes he could stop, but it is not that easy. He says early in the novel, “Why does anyone think they can control what they feel?”
Carrying his gun, thinking about sex and considering suicide all comfort Jim’s troubled mind. He tells Gary of a NASA experiment when astronauts took a halibut to the moon. “They didn’t mean for it to survive. It was supposed to have one beautiful flight, is all. That’s all any of us are meant to have. None of us survive.”
David Vann’s artistic rendering of his father’s struggle must have helped to repair his own heart. The book’s dialogue captures the wild gyrations of Jim’s mind. Vann reveals the unrestrained euphoria and crushing depression that define Jim’s exhausting existence. It is generous of Vann to share this poignant and powerful story. His evocative writing helps us understand the erratic and illogical thinking that can come with mental illness. We become witnesses to a man stuck in a tunnel of pain while his helpless family cannot reach him. You many not “enjoy” ‘Halibut on the Moon’, but you will likely read it to the end and emerge from the experience with greater empathy for those among us who cannot control the machinations of their mind.
Night Train to Lisbon by Pascal Mercier
Whenever I am about to embark on a trip, I thoroughly enjoy searching for stories set in the city of my destination. Earlier this month, my husband and I traveled to Lisbon, Portugal. In our luggage, we packed Lisbon books that we relished reading in the city’s cafés.
My favorite novel was Pascal Mercier’s Night Train to Lisbon written in 2004. The book follows the midlife journey of Raimund Gregorius a 57-year-old divorced classics professor living in Bern, Switzerland. After years in the same routine, he is open to change. He knows his life is half over and feels envy toward his students, “How much life they still have before them; how open their future still is; how much can still happen to them; how much they can still experience.”
While walking to his school one morning in the pouring rain, he notices a woman leaning over the edge of a bridge reading a letter. It appears that she might jump, but doesn’t. They speak briefly and Gregorius learns one fact about her: she is Portuguese. The encounter shakes him. Rather than teach his class, he walks to a nearby hotel and has a cup of tea. He has taken the first step to change his life.
Then at his local bookstore, Gregorius coincidently discovers a book by a Portuguese man named Amadeu Inácio de Almeida Prado. The book is titled A Goldsmith of Words. The introduction strikes a chord with Gregorius. Prado writes of wanting to become the ‘archeologist of his soul’ to understand the choices of his life. “Given that we can live only a small part of what there is in us –what happens with the rest?” These two Portuguese connected events inspire him. Within a couple of days, he makes an uncharacteristic decision and boards a train to Lisbon. He hopes to learn more about Amadeu Prado.
The novel follows Gregorius as he wanders through the streets of Lisbon learning about the complex life of Amadeus Prado and the book Prado wrote thirty years ago. When Prado and his friends were young, they had been part of the resistance against the right wing dictator António Salazar who ruled Portugal for 36 years. Like a John Le Carré or Dan Brown novel, the story follows Gregorius as he slowly pieces together what happened to Prado and his fellow fighters leading up to the Portuguese revolution of 1974. The book is not about the politics of Portugal. Rather the novel focuses on the now middle age resistance members who Gregorius meets. They each look back at the group’s complicated dynamics and the life and death choices they made during that terrifying time. Gregorius has empathy for each person’s plight and feels invigorated as he grasps each person’s perspective. The novel contains Prado’s plaintive philosophical and psychological musings about parents, love, religion and the meaning of life.
This novel was engaging, enjoyable and stimulating. Even if you are not in Lisbon, Night Train to Lisbon is a wonderful ride.
