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selkie at 09:07pm on 13/01/2006
selkie at 09:07pm on 13/01/2006I've just finished reading A Thread of Grace, by Mary Doria Russell.
I wish I could do that, verdammte.
It was an amazing read. I cried at two points, one I would not have expected, near the end. The characterization 'made' the book, and the writing was as remarkable for its not-telling as for what was revealed. I was stunned, in the old, more literal sense of stunned. And nobody makes perfect choices and nearly everybody dies -- good people and horrible people are consigned to all different directions by fate. There's no banner character that makes it through shiny and clean. Facts and memories are revealed little by little, people vanish, things are cryptic and frustrating.
I thought I was jaded and inured to modern Holocaust literature -- my own book included, if you wondered -- but this was just breathtaking. I would have got through it in a week, but I kept putting it down because I was horrified of what might happen next.
I wish I could do that, verdammte.
It was an amazing read. I cried at two points, one I would not have expected, near the end. The characterization 'made' the book, and the writing was as remarkable for its not-telling as for what was revealed. I was stunned, in the old, more literal sense of stunned. And nobody makes perfect choices and nearly everybody dies -- good people and horrible people are consigned to all different directions by fate. There's no banner character that makes it through shiny and clean. Facts and memories are revealed little by little, people vanish, things are cryptic and frustrating.
I thought I was jaded and inured to modern Holocaust literature -- my own book included, if you wondered -- but this was just breathtaking. I would have got through it in a week, but I kept putting it down because I was horrified of what might happen next.
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Nice to see I'm not alone in my reactions.
I would have cried over Mirella Soncini and that entire cellar of children if only she (er, Mary Doria Russell) hadn't written it so gimmickily.
Nice icon, by the way.
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hadn't written it so gimmickily.
I will also confess that I had a bit of a bet on with myself over whether they would survive the war or not . . . I've since read that Russell literally flipped a coin at crucial moments in the narrative to determine who would live and who would not, so that it would be real chance rather than authorial pseudo-randomness dictating their fates, but I still agree with you.
Nice icon, by the way.
Thanks. It is courtesy of
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On a note related only to that on which I am working, how does she come up out of the sea again? I only remember that she does, indeed, have her husband with her.
If I get on AIM my brain will be sucked out and consumed, so we'll just manage things this way.
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You are lucky that I have a transcription of the IM conversation which did indeed suck out my brain into this story, so . . .
And holding the hand of bone in her own hand, the fisherman's wife turns and begins, slowly, to climb back up the rope love-knotted around her waist to the world of air, the world of the land. Through the seven layers of the sea—describe them as you will—she climbs, and she does not look back. And maybe if she'd looked behind her, she'd have seen the sea reclothing her husband in his flesh, giving back everything that the sea had taken from him in his descent, layer by layer: the veins over the bone, and the sinews, and the muscle over the sinews, and the skin over that, hair and eyes and nails and clothes, until finally when she breaks the surface of the waves, she sees her husband.
But she doesn't look back, and she's so worn out from her descent and return that she can't pull herself into the little rowboat; but he can, and he helps her in; and she holds him, in the middle of the wide sea, and he holds her.
And she sees, when she pulls back enough to look into his face, that behind his eyes there is the darkness of that seventh layer of the sea, the rushing black as ancient as time; and when he speaks, she will always hear the break and tumble of the waves beneath his voice. There is a part of him that will always belong to the sea now.
But he says, with his hands, I love you, and he is not looking at the sea but at her; and together they begin to row back to the shore.
Will that do?
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Some sensitive things, and really sad, but... Amazingly good.