Booklog for Charlotte

Cold by Bill Streever reviewed in today's NYT looks good!

Hiding in the Spotlight by Greg Dawson

This is the true story of two Ukrainian Jewish sisters who miraculously survived Hitler and Stalin.  Jhanna and Frina were child prodigies who were offered scholarships to the music conservancies in both Kharkov and Moscow when they were very young.  When the Nazis came to Kharkov, they narrowly escaped the fate of their parents and grandparents and lived by the grace of strangers who risked their lives to help the girls.  Eventually they were discovered to be musically talented and they played first for the Nazis with a troupe of musicians, dancers and other entertainers in the Ukraine; the troupe was then moved to Berlin.  From there, under Nazi guard, they traveled to various slave labor camps to perform for the workers.  At the end of the war they again narrowly escaped death when they were not repatriated to Russia where Stalin was putting to death prisoners of war who returned to Russia.  In their Displaced Persons camp they had the good fortune of coming to the attention of a man named Larry Dawson from Crozet, Virginia, who recognized their talent and with great determination managed to send them to his family farm there.  Larry's brother David was a musical prodigy who went to Julliard at age 14; after 9 months on the farm in Crozet, the girls were given scholarships to Julliard and eventually Zhanna married David.  David took a job at Indiana University's great music school and they raised their family in Bloomington, Indiana. 

Their son, Greg (the author) and his wife Candy were neighbors of ours in Bloomington in the 70s as they were beginning their own family and I do remember hearing the story of Greg's mother.  I also remember loving the columns he wrote in the local paper; and a favorite memory is of Greg referring to the Beethoven string quartets as "an acquired taste."   (A taste I have acquired in the interim.)

This book made me weep in turn for the unspeakable acts humans perpetrate and for their acts of great valor and goodness.  It's an amazing story, very well told. 

Here's the website with pictures of Greg and Candy's visit to the Ukraine where they saw Drobitsky Yar, the ravine where the Nazis shot 16,000 Jews, including his grandparents and great-grandparents. 

Molly Fox's Birthday by Deirdre Madden

This book was published in London and is not available in the US at this point (it is available at Alderman Library).  I read about it in the blog Reading Matters, which had an enthusiastic endorsement of it.

The narrator, a successful Irish playwright who lives in London, casually and companionably recounts to us her life and the lives of her friends over the course of a single day.  That day is the birthday of her best friend Molly Fox, a successful theatre actress in whose Dublin house the narrator is staying while Molly is in New York.  We hear how they met, how the narrator does her work, what she has learned about acting and actors, the story of her connection with her family in Northern Ireland, the story of her friend Andrew and more.  The characters, as she tells us about them, have interest, but do not have a dramatic arc.  She tells us what she has come to understand about human beings that she has learned over the course of her life. 

She and Andrew met in college where he was a dedicated student, determined to escape from the family in Northern Ireland that was completely alien to him.  He was "the most patently and successfully self-constructed person I have ever met."  Many years passed before he could come to terms with the murder of his brother, a Loyalist paramilitary who may have been a murderer himself. The narrator, although she was not able to live the life of her large Catholic family, remained close and spoke to them frequently by phone, keeping up with all their mundane news.  Their formulaic conversation does make for true communication, she says.  Molly Fox's beautiful and commanding voice was a significant part of her success on the stage; off stage she was shy and barely able to cope with a crowd of people. 

So why is this book so engaging?  I can say it is filled with insights into humans lovingly observed, and I felt I was being told a story by an old friend, but that does not convey the artistry of this beautiful book.

Stories: from the View from Castle Rock by Alice Munro

Audiobook.  These short stories were written over the years by Alice Munro but held out from her other compilations because they were based on material she found about one side of her family named Laidlaw.  They came to America from an obscure part of Scotland called the Ettrick valley, described in a 1779 description of Scotland as having "no advantages."  The stories arose from the detailed letters written by members of the various generations or from situations she found about them; "their words and my words" as she says.  Rarely is a "family history" so artful. 

Before they left Scotland, they went to Edinburgh and visited Castle Rock.  

Here are two views from Castle Rock and a view of Castle Rock taken during our 2005 visit to Edinburgh.

View of Arthur's Seat

Calton Hill in the distance

Entrance to Castle Rock

Books to Read

Remembering the Bones by Frances Itani -- highly recommended by Corinne.

The Girl With No Shadow by Joanne Harris

The sequel to Chocolat, this book is set in Montmartre in Paris.  The Butte, as it is referred to, is painted as a village from another era.  Each short chapter tells the story from the point of view of each of the major characters:  Zozie, the wicked witch; Vianne, the wizard of chocolate that we know from Chocolat; and her daughter Anouk.  The various characters from their little square are fun:  the exhuberant fat boy, the withdrawn anorexic girl (you can guess that plotline), the mean rich woman, the former moulin rouge dancer who now sells religious trinkets, and others. 

At the outset I was not sure I would like this for 440 pages, but within 50 pages, I was hooked and reading happily at every opportunity.  The loving pictures she paints of chocolate making are irresistible.