Rating: 
Summary: a triumphant fusion of silence and voice, despair and hope
Review: Elizabeth Rosner has written an extraordinary debut novel in "The Speed of Light," an elegant, understated work which tackles such serious themes as the Holocaust's impact on the children of survivors, political massacre in Latin America and the significance of personal connection as a means of liberating the human possibiliites of hope, memory and love. "Speed" is that kind of lovely, slow-paced psychological novel where three decent people, scarred deeply by the anguish of either directly or derivately witnessing horrific suffering, learn that shared memory, tenderness and the need to risk everything for love assist them in overcoming the pain of a murderous past. This brilliant work ultimately is about possibilities: of living in a world drenched with blood, of overcoming enormous personal fears, of embracing one another's past to insure the chance of mutual survival.Each of the three central characters has a unique voice (so much so that this latticed work includes three different type settings) and presents his or her own complicated confrontation with silence and memory. Each character gropes for meaning; each confronts the terror of the past, the anguish of living a solitary life and the desperate fear of abandonment, great sadness and existential isolation. Each character learns the nobility of bearing witness. Julian Perel has absorbed the silence and imagined Holocaust memory of his father, Jacob. Living upstairs from his musically-gifted sister, Julian is an obsessive recluse, immersed in a life of suffocating detail, terrified of human touch, suspicious of language and voice. He theorizes that his father "gave up his language because it belonged to the killers; he could not live with the sounds of their voices inside his own." Like his now deceased father, Julian speaks in "the vocabulary of science and never reveal[s] his heart." Tormented by a past which he does not fully comprehend but which dominates his personality, Julian's self-imposed isolation is at once a private punishment and a social rebuke. It is only through his halting relationship with Sola, a hired housekeeper, that he begins the process of personal integration. Hired by Paula Perel to oversee her downstairs apartment while pereforming in Europe's opera houses, Sola expands her domestic obligations as she initiates a friendship, a relationship, with the reluctant Julian. Sola, ravaged by memories of her village's annihilation at the hands of a brutal Latin American despotism, has her own torment, unshared and terribly burdensome. Slowly, quietly, Sola and Julian begin to learn a central lesson: sharing memories and making others become derivative witnesses to social evil is a good thing. By permitting this "buried language" to surface, Sola initiates a process by which both Julian and she perceive the possibilities of life. The most tragic figure in "Speed" is Paula Perel, whose operatic voice soars through her apartment and vibrates with immediate beauty. Seemingly oblivious to post-Holocaust trauma, Paula sets out to Europe to test the quality of her voice. There she discovers the hidden story of her family's past with shattering consequences. Where Julian has had a lifetime to absorb memory and silence, Paula has but days. She learns that inflicted silence "bruises the heart," that her father's heart must have been "completely black and blue from a lifetime of sorless grief banging around in his chest." How Paula confronts both her own personal crisis and the implications of the Holocaust on her professional life is one of the many instructive moments of the novel. "The Speed of Light" is nothing less than brilliant. Invoking the Hasidic teaching that "there are three ways to mourn: through tears, through silence, and by turning sorrow into song," Elizabeth Rosner has crafted a moving novel about love and meaning and connection in the midst of remembered pain and sorrow. Through her sensitive portrayal of three fully-imagined protagonists, Rosner teaches us that people can emerge from the wilderness of despair to the refreshing oasis of possibility, voice and connection.
Rating: 
Summary: An Elegant and Overwhelmingly Worthwhile Read
Review: Elizabeth Rosner's debut novel, THE SPEED OF LIGHT, heralds a unique and beautiful new literary voice. The story of three young people haunted by the violence and sadness of the past, this novel is engaging and lyrical, despite the dark and bloody secrets it contains. Julian and Paula Perel grew up in the shadow of the Holocaust. Their father, a Hungarian survivor of Auschwitz, was --- for the most part --- silent about the horrors he experienced and how he survived. In America, he began a career and created a family. His personal history was mysterious but obviously brutal, as obvious and brutal as the faded blue numbers on his arm. Julian and Paula each had a very different type of relationship with their father. And they each innately interpret and express their father's past and pain in very different ways. Julian, like his father, seeks solace in science. He is a solitary and eccentric figure, living in an apartment above the one belonging to his sister, with eleven televisions and a rigid routine. Overly sensitive to his environment, Julian relies on Paula both emotionally and physically. Paula, instead of living in near silence and stillness like Julian and her father, fills the Perel house with music. In her own way Paula seeks order. A gifted classically trained opera singer, Paula, from a young age, trained vigorously, even living for years with her voice coach as a teenager. When she leaves for Europe for a string of auditions, her brother is left virtually alone. Enter Sola Luz. Sola, a beautiful Latin American refugee, is Paula's housekeeper. Paula arranges for Sola to stay in her apartment for one month to keep an eye on Julian while she is abroad. Sola is relieved to be out of her own small, dark apartment for a while and is certainly curious about and intrigued by Julian. Sola, like Julian and Paula's father, witnessed mass murder, the destruction of her village and the loss of her family. She has carried the tragedy with her for a long time, never fully sharing her pain. Now these three --- Julian, Paula and Sola --- in six weeks time must each face the sadness and destruction in their pasts and come to terms with it, with each other and with themselves. For Paula, the catalyst for catharsis is a trip to Hungary and the discovery of her family's history of music and her father's deepest secret. For Julian and Sola, their growing friendship and spiritual connection cause each to step beyond their self-imposed emotional and physical boundaries to begin to heal past hurts. While THE SPEED OF LIGHT is undeniably a well-written novel, it swings frantically --- sometimes paragraph to paragraph --- between the voices of the three protagonists, so it is a bit of a challenging read. This jagged pace is alternately frustrating and entrancing. If the reader can abide the choppiness, a wonderful and poignant novel is the reward. From the first pages of this fairly short book, Rosner packs an emotional punch. Often heartbreaking but always hopeful, THE SPEED OF LIGHT is less about the sorrows of the past and more about healing through sharing. Julian, Paula and Sola are all damaged by circumstances beyond their control. Each is burdened with a load too heavy to shoulder alone and find that by giving voice to sadness, loneliness, fear and loss, they can begin to recover and move towards happiness. Rosner presents the reader with three characters, stronger than they themselves know, at a moment of upheaval. This upheaval allows for profound transformation. The transformative journeys in THE SPEED OF LIGHT make an elegant and overwhelmingly worthwhile read. --- Reviewed by Sarah Rachel Egelman
Rating: 
Summary: Too Precious and Self-conscious
Review: I cried my way through this book, spoiling a lot of perfectly good lunches and alarming my fellow restauranteurs in the process. And I'm a construction worker for crying out loud! Why? Why was it so moving? I've always viewed words with suspicion. We think that they tell us so much, but it's what they leave out that is their defining feature. They are really just units of a secret code that we've learned so as to share the most abbreviated version of our experiences. Even the most effusive, overblown language is nothing more than a sanitized, lifeless short hand for the brawling, rowdy reality of our experiences. Dice it, slice it, run it through the compactor until you have little interchangeable units of meaning - the LEGOs of our language - then use them to build a structure that we can all meet in....and we call this ...Communication?...Art? Words are like dollars, a means of exchange with no intrinsic value. They pile up like leaves blown into the corners of our lives until our senses are overwhelmed and all we can do is think....in words. I'd rather dance, sing, or touch to communicate, to make Art, than use words. Words, in a word, are the enemy. Or so I thought until I experienced what Ms Rosner can do with them. I didn't know it was possible. The mountain is reduced to the hill and the hill to a small pile and the pile to a few phrases, and the phrases to a couple of words, and the words......open the door to a world of feeling and we are home again, home at last, saved from our stupid machinations...by words... by you, Ms. Rosner. It's a form of magic. That's all I can come up with. You say the magic words and things change.
Rating:
Summary: Journey to Hope
Review: I found Elizabeth Rosner's Speed of Light a lyrical and surprising novel. It is the first work of fiction or non-fiction I've read which gives a believable sense of hope for an emotionally whole life for the "second generation," children of Holocaust survivors. My daughter, in the "third generation," also felt very connected to the content and context of the characters' inner and outer lives. I felt the novel showed the universality of trauma--that witnessing mass murder first or secondhand causes permanent vulnerabilities, regardless of the age, gender, class, race or nationality of the witness--and wove that concept together with a positive subtext that even those who don't talk about their trauma, may work to "undo" it by helping others experiencing a wholly different trauma, explaining to me why so many survivors silent about their own pasts are very politically active to help other oppressed groups. On my first reading I thought the protagonist was the extroverted sister, who maintained her positive outlook by being away from her family as much as possible. The second time through, I thought the book was focused on the introverted brother, who was so vulnerable and intolerant of the unexpected that he could scarcely leave his apartment. Who knows how the book will present a third face on my next trip into the falling gingko leaves? What is clear is that Rosner has created a hopeful, believable vision relevant to those who are survivors, children of survivors, grandchildren of survivors, or who work with survivors.
Rating: 
Summary: interesting characters
Review: I liked the characters in this book. The book centered on three people, Julian Perel, a brilliant man whose childhood has made him turn into himself. He rarely leaves his bedroom and watches television all day. Paula Perel, who is an opera singer who leaves home in search of a career. Sola, thier cleaning lady who is a refugee, running from memories. It is worth reading this book, but the plot left me a little stalled in the water. As the book progresses, the chracters progress, but the plot really doesn't go anywhere. It is worth reading however, and I would be interested in reading other books by the writer
Rating:
Summary: Thumbs up
Review: In found the Speed of Light to be an extremely intense and original book that takes an in-depth look at second-generation holocaust victims. This book is written from the viewpoint of three different They each refer to themselves as I. The characters are differentiated from each other in the book simply by change in fount. Each character has its own font. And I also noticed that each character has an individual way of thinking and this also sets them apart and really shows how well written this book is. This is an interesting way to write this story since each of these people has a different internal holocaust experience and this is another way to communicate these individual experiences.
The story is about three people Julian, his sister Paula and their house keeper Sola. Julian and Paula's father was a holocaust survivor. Julian is a reclusive, genius shut-in who stays in his room all day writing a physics dictionary and watching his eleven televisions, which he has stacked in a large square. Paula was born which an amazing talent to sing. She travels abroad, training in opera, and also learns the dark past of their father's. Sola is a housekeeper who has just witnessed a horrible event where she lost most of her loved ones. He story unravels as we learn at the same time about the main characters.
The story amazing timing it slowly reveals the history of its characters all about the same time. This lays down an interesting foundation for the characters. This rapid jumping of time frames really keeps the reader on the edge of his or her seat.
The Speed of Light is filled with great detail that. The book was very good but at the beginning I found it hard to understand who was talking because of the fount changes and all of the strange first person but once you get into it is a really great book.
I would strongly recommend this book.
Rating:
Summary: A beautifully-crafted novel.
Review: Rather than write a synopsis of the book, or suggest who may or may not enjoy it, I simply want to say that The Speed of Light is one of the most wonderfully poignant, emotional, thoughtful books I have ever read about love, loss and human relationships. The writing is so lovely and so poetic, that irrespective of your inclination toward prose or poetry, you cannot help but be moved by the language of the book. Also, the manner in which the writer presents the points of view of the three main characters is so perfectly executed that she makes a difficult style choice appear simple. Liz Rosner is a gifted writer. This book should be on everyone's shelf. I have bought it as a gift for many friends and cannot recommend it any more heartily. Read it read it read it.
Rating:
Summary: sensitivity
Review: Rosner writes with incredible insight and compassion from the point of view of three distinct narrators. This book is a study of living in the aftermath of the horrors that humans inflict upon one another, of the repercussions those horrors have for those who survive. It's a thoughtful and honest reflection on what it is to be human, to live life as an affirmation of what is good in the human spirit without forgetting or down-playing the human capacity for cruelty or forgetting those whose lives were lost because of that cruelty. It's one of the first books I've read since high school that left me in tears--not sentimental tears, but tears that felt cleansing, cathartic. I put it down feeling as if I'd had a transfusion of a compatible sensibility.
Rating:
Summary: A Flawed but Entertaining Read
Review: Speed of Light is an impressive debut. Rosner writing is clear, poetic, and moves well. My only complaint is that the Holocaust material is neither clearly nor compellingly woven into the novel. When Paula, the sister, goes off to Europe, she nearly disappears. And her discoveries about her father's past and his legacy and impact on her and their family is limp, disappointly so as she could have, as they say, knocked one out of the ballpark. That said, Speed of Light was an impressive, ambitious beginning and by no means a total failure. I look forward to seeing what Rosner does next.
Rating:
Summary: A Thoughtful Book on a Hard-hitting Subject
Review: The characters in this book are people who might be living on any urban apartment block - people who are living each day and suffering in the present from events of the past. Brother and sister Julian and Paula are affected by their parents' experiences in surviving the Holocaust. Their housecleaner, Sola, has made her way to the U.S. from Mexico after her native village is brutally destroyed. This very quiet but intense novel is not about the catastrophes that have occurred but the long-term damage and eventual healing that happens when the characters come together. Elizabeth Rosner's language describes beautifully the things that pass through the characters' minds as they try to get through each day without losing their sanity. I like the simplicity of this theme. Some of the passages are really true to life. Every adult person I know can relate to the characters in this book as they struggle with the difficulty of basic communication and in reaching out to one another in today's world. I recommend this book as a great purchase this holiday season, which for many people will be a somber, thoughtful one in terms of gift giving.
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