Rating: 
Summary: Good storytelling
Review: This is a simple story portraying very complex emotions. I wouldn't describe this as a story that I "couldn't put down" but rather one that I would "go back to" because it is one that stays in your heart. The writing style is truly fine-tuned and the flashbacks into the past are so well done.
The explanation of the line carved in the bottom of the sewing desk "When the Jews are gone, we will be the next ones", is so well done. Things are never as they seem.
This is a wonderful example of how each of us cannot escape our history, but we have choices: we either have to let it overcome us or come to terms with it.
Rating: 
Summary: Bittersweet!
Review: This tender but sad story touches on the loneliness of an elderly man, guilt over his family's past, his lost relationship with his son and former wife, and the expectations he puts on a friendship based on a relic from his past. More than anything it expresses just how fleeting relationships are in this life and how important it is to have something onto which to hold in times of uncertainty. Told beautifully through Tristan's relationships with two young women (one a former student) in his present life and flashbacks to his life as a child in Nazi Europe (the Netherlands and Germany), this story is presented in such as way as to expose the vulnerability of one elderly man and leave the reader feeling just a bit sadder for having read this touching novel.
Rating:
Summary: Compelling, heartfelt fiction
Review: This wise and gorgeously wrought novel had me by the heart from its first sentence. Tristan Martens, a retired entomologist in his seventies, has discovered by accident the blackened pine sewing table once owned by his mother in the Nazi occupied Netherlands. As he recognizes it in the New York antique shop - "this ghost, this small, lost thing, floating like a piece of impossible wreckage toward me" - he knows he must possess it to keep its secret from the world. The owner Cora Lowenstein, who has misinterpreted the childlike scrawl on the table's underside, stands in his way. The table is not for sale. And so Tristan begins to scheme in his careful but ultimately clumsy way to persuade her otherwise. Dressler is a skilled novelist with a flair for language and storytelling. The voice of Tristan is so authentic and honest that I can't imagine any reader emerging from this tale without a deep affection for him. As he struggles with guilt, his grown and unyielding son, the stirrings of love, and his mortality, we come to understand that a seemingly simple life is not necessarily so. His last graduate student Elida periodically bursts into his apartment, urging him to leave his boxes of dead beetles to get out more, but we already know Tristan has done and seen more than she has (though Elida, too, has her demons.) THE DEADWOOD BEETLE is one of those books that lingers in the imagination long after its reading. You won't regret a minute spent with this author and her extraordinary novel.
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