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I'm having trouble with this ebook. All sorts of formatting problems are cropping up, that weren't in the previous book in the series.
From Princeton sociologist and MacArthur "Genius" Matthew Desmond, a landmark work of scholarship and reportage that will forever change the …
A man bears witness to his grandfather's deathbed confessions, which reveal his family's long-buried history and his involvement in a …
Music can move us to the heights or depths of emotion. It can persuade us to buy something, or remind …
I found it interesting, spotlighting an era that is usually forgotten, and people who are totally ignored by history. I liked the way that the point of view was handed off between the four women, but that each one remained in the others' narratives. But, the character development, well, it wasn't. Each woman started out with her own specific mystical perfection and carried it through the story. There was a great deal of brutal violence in the book, which is not surprising, considering that it took place entirely during a war. And I wished that it had been edited down a bit.
An award-winning foreign correspondent who contributed to a Pulitzer Prize-winning New York Times series reveals the secret Afghan custom of …
Every day we experience the uncertainty, risks, and emotional exposure that define what it means to be vulnerable or to …
The circus arrives without warning. No announcements precede it. It is simply there, when yesterday …
A fantasy about magic. And love. I normally don't like fantasy, considering it merely a form of science fiction in which the author gets to make up the rules as she goes. But in this one, that was the whole point. And it was the protagonists who kept changing the rules of the game. The end result was, literally, magical.
Examines "the lives of contemporary archaeologists as they sweat under the sun for clues to the puzzle of our past. …
The Madonnas of Leningrad, Debra Dean's first novel, tells the story of Marina, a docent …
Back in the seventies I spent a semester at Leningrad State University. A bus met us at the airport, loaded up us and our luggage, and took us, not to our dorm, but straight to the cemetery where the bulk of the victims of the siege are buried. Acres and acres of graves. But not in rows of individual graves. The dead were layered in great trenches that were covered in mounds of earth when they filled up.
There were still a great many survivors of the siege in Leningrad at the time, middle-aged and elderly women, for the most part. They were the ones who took long bus rides on Sundays to the few churches that were left open, or scolded young people for dropping gum wrappers on the street. And you didn't even think of smart talking them.
So, this book spoke to me. Marina's memories of 1941-42 …
Back in the seventies I spent a semester at Leningrad State University. A bus met us at the airport, loaded up us and our luggage, and took us, not to our dorm, but straight to the cemetery where the bulk of the victims of the siege are buried. Acres and acres of graves. But not in rows of individual graves. The dead were layered in great trenches that were covered in mounds of earth when they filled up.
There were still a great many survivors of the siege in Leningrad at the time, middle-aged and elderly women, for the most part. They were the ones who took long bus rides on Sundays to the few churches that were left open, or scolded young people for dropping gum wrappers on the street. And you didn't even think of smart talking them.
So, this book spoke to me. Marina's memories of 1941-42 are real. More real, to her, than the time and place she now resides in. But with a tinge of unreality as well, colored by sixty years of living past the war, or by starvation induced hallucinations during it.
Barnes & Noble edition of original 1932 book.
It was tough going there for a while, with an unsympathetic narrator who was interested only in himself and might well be shading his memoir to paint himself in the best possible light. He very much put me in mind of Lolita's Humbert Humbert - an unreliable narrator. And that was before the Roshomon-like postscripts, where the surviving characters each gave their own version of the events, and you're left to pick and choose which 'truth' to believe.
Beautifully written, a tapestry of lives, in which even the most minor character (so long as he's a man) is finely drawn, with a rich history and hopes and dreams. The female characters, not so much. Not at all, to be exact. But my main problem with the book was its complete lack of plot or character development. Which probably throws it into the realm of a picaresque. Make that, a picturesque picaresque.
