Rating: 
Summary: Uplifting story in spite of its graphic sorrow
Review: The Speed of Light is a a novel with elements of epic poetry that can help each of us learn about our own wounds and how they might be healed. Elizabeth Rosner has written an important book that left me deeply moved on two levels. First, there is the story of three characters each struggling to live life under the shadow of their families being victims of the most horrible crimes against humanity. Secondly, there are the words Rosner finds to describe the internal landscapes of these people, and I found myself moved to tears at times by her descriptions. The poetic style reminded me of Ondaatje's writing in The English Patient.
Much of the story is told through the eyes of Julian, whose parents were Holocaust survivors. Here is description from his childhood:
"For a time there was a baby living next door to the house I grew up in. Late at night, when the baby woke up crying, I awoke too, feeling as if the sound of that baby came from inside of me. I lay there in the dark and waited for someone to bring the child the comfort it needed.
How could anyone bear it? I often wondered. How could anyone even attempt to bridge the gap between oneself and the world? All I knew how to do was live deep inside my body, far from the dangerous surface...
My father had no capacity for joy: it was squeezed out of him before I entered the world. Perhaps the years of being with my mother saved him for a little while, but even she realized it was impossible to resurrect someone standing so close to his own grave." Julian's sister, Paula, carries this same trauma in an opposite way. She thrusts herself into the world as a potential opera singer. While she drives herself relentlessly outward into the world, she is unable to help Julian, who retreats to an internal life of suffering in which he often watches eleven television sets simultaneously and stays within a few blocks of his home at all times.
It is while Paula is traveling in Europe that Julian meets Paula's housekeeper, Sola. Sola's family was also the victim of mass brutality, but her response to this loss is so different than Julian's or Paula's that she is able to bring a new energy into Julian's life and the result is the wondrous mystery of this book.
The 20th Century was dominated by unprecedented collective traumas the impact of which is usually ignored in explanations of why there is such massive cultural and individual dysfunction today. Yet, it is fairly easy to see the collective impact of the massive crimes against humanity the world has lived through in the last 100 years. The brutal killing of so many people has left a visible scar across the personal, physical and political landscapes of our planet. The continuing search for solutions to intractable poverty and oppression in the Middle East, Africa and Latin America are part of the living collective wounds we must all confront as world citizens.
Rosner's book takes us into the internal world of just three lonely survivors of these holocausts and yet their story offers a penetrating insight into our collective pain and our potential path toward recovery and wholeness. She reveals in her lyrical style how an individual can be deeply wounded by a collective crime and somehow triumph over that wound by sharing her need for love as a way out of the pain. Survivors often become bitter, angry, souls, who shut themselves down and pass on their pain to others. Yet if just one wounded soul can rise above these responses and realize that it is the lack of love that caused the wound, the results can be a gentle, magnificent triumph of healing. Survivors such as these finds their way to finally end the continuing rupture of their own living spirit.
This is the important message of this wonderful book. Whether our wounds are the consequence of a collective trauma or a more random loss of love through illness, accident or individual abuse, the paths of the compulsive achiever or the lonely cynic will not bring us the healing we need. Our path to healing lies in reaching out from behind that wound and finding our common humanity with the love of others.
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Rating:
Summary: Another Child of Holocaust Survivors
Review: The Speed of Light is an incredible book. I've been in a book group for 10 years, and I think this book rates as one of my top ten, perhaps even top five! It's right up there with Correlli's Mandolin and Samuri's Garden. The story is rich with raw truth, tender love, fear of the past, yet hope for the future. Also, being a child of two Holocaust survivors, I could fully empathize with all three characters of the book and their full range of emotions. Rosner's writing style is very poetic, bringing beauty to a story of trauma that could otherwise be too difficult to read. It was a totally absorbing book and I highly recommend it!
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