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Rating: 
Summary: wonderful book by a fine and perceptive writer
Review: Although the plot is intriguing, the real appeal of Kai Maristed's work is in her feel for language, sensitivity to psychological nuance, and, oddly, her muscularity of thinking. She's a fabulous writer, and it's a scandal that she is not better known.
Rating:
Summary: broken ground
Review: I picked up a copy of this book on the advice of a friend, and it was wonderful...a serious novel that read like a detective story, I would recommend this novel to anyone.
Rating:
Summary: Absolutely Amazing!
Review: This is an excellent novel. The story follows Kaethe Schalk, a woman of both German and American background, back and forth through time as she travels back to Berlin in search for her adult daughter. It is told mainly from Schalk's point of view (she is writing to her daughter), with small bits jumping in from her daughter and her landlady. The novel is historically astute, encompassing the tensions between East and West, the fall of the Berlin Wall, the tensions between the classes and lack thereof in her American background. The story is about memories and misremembering -- the writing pulls you in to feel that you are remembering them, even though you don't know the memory until you've read it. But you feel the immediacy, that you are tasting each memory, the taste and smell bringing you back to your own childhood. Maristed's descriptions are perfect -- they pull in the past to tell the whole story -- a seamless way of telling an historical and political story in an extremely human and beautifully well-written way. The beauty of the story, spanning technically one generation, but really three, and using a very real setting for universal themes.
I can only compare it to Thomas Mann's "Buddenbrooks" -- but it would not be subtitled "The Decline of a Family" -- perhaps "The Decline of (a) Life." Sweet, beautiful, horrible life and how we deal with its problems -- all in beautiful poetic prose.A perfect literary novel. I cannot recommend this book enough.
Rating:
Summary: Absolutely Amazing!
Review: This is an excellent novel. The story follows Kaethe Schalk, a woman of both German and American background, back and forth through time as she travels back to Berlin in search for her adult daughter. It is told mainly from Schalk's point of view (she is writing to her daughter), with small bits jumping in from her daughter and her landlady. The novel is historically astute, encompassing the tensions between East and West, the fall of the Berlin Wall, the tensions between the classes and lack thereof in her American background. The story is about memories and misremembering -- the writing pulls you in to feel that you are remembering them, even though you don't know the memory until you've read it. But you feel the immediacy, that you are tasting each memory, the taste and smell bringing you back to your own childhood. Maristed's descriptions are perfect -- they pull in the past to tell the whole story -- a seamless way of telling an historical and political story in an extremely human and beautifully well-written way. The beauty of the story, spanning technically one generation, but really three, and using a very real setting for universal themes.
I can only compare it to Thomas Mann's "Buddenbrooks" -- but it would not be subtitled "The Decline of a Family" -- perhaps "The Decline of (a) Life." Sweet, beautiful, horrible life and how we deal with its problems -- all in beautiful poetic prose. A perfect literary novel. I cannot recommend this book enough.
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