Breath and Shadows (Ballantine Reader's Circle)

Rating:
Summary: Spans 3 generations and centuries
Review: An epic tale that spans 3 generations, each separated by a century, Breath and Shadows is authored by Ella Leffland, a reclusive San Francisco writer. A dwarf from the 1700s wins our sympathy while disgusting us at the same time. Next comes a lovely couple with children living out their affluent life in a country home in the 1800s - but there are ominous hints that disaster lies just around the next corner. Then there are two siblings living in our modern era, and they seem strangely disconnected, bored with life and their existence. These people cannot know each other, separated as they are by 100 years - but readers begin to grasp subtle connections that make sense of their combined histories.
A tour de force.

Rating:
Summary: some things you will never know
Review: I confess that I am awarding this novel 5 stars in part to counter some of the low ratings given to the book by other customer reviewers.
I was not put off in the least by the three-part structure. Every third chapter is about the same generation. The generations are presented in chronological order and each block of three chapters is prefaced by brief description of the interior of cave, the significance of which is made explicit at the end of the novel. There is absolutely nothing confusing, puzzling or arbitrary about any of this. Quite the opposite: it makes the unfolding of the plot(s) more dramatic and drives home the theme of the novel, which is a meditation on the difficulty of finding truth in your life.

The recent movie "The Hours", based on a Michael Cunningham novel that I have not read, uses much the same technique, but is focussed on a different theme and the geneaological relationships among the characters are not as extensive. Each group of characters in the Leffland novel are members of the same family, one separated from the other by two or three generations. Leffland is quite good at making connections among the generations, some of the physical, such as the flowered rug made by Grete Rosted that has talismanic significance for Paula, although she never finds out that her own grandmother made it. Some of the connections are metaphysical, such as the compulsion to travel extemporaneously shared by Thorkild, his grandson and Philip. She is also quite good about showing us the hazy boundary between the memories of old people and the written historical record. And the varying reliability of both.

Leffland is an excellent plotter. The narratives are each compelling in their own right and while some threads are tied together at the end, the author has the art and good taste to leave some hanging, allowing the reader to imagine, for example the grimness of Thorkild's end. She uses a trick of switching to the present tense at the beginning and ends of each chapter, which makes the action quite immediate and has the effect of repeatedly building a bridge between the generations. One can almost sense the author's growing excitement and engagement as the book progresses. The prose of the initial chapters is a bit halting and the chapters are short. But as the novel progresses, the prose grows more fluid and the chapters stretch out to accomodate the sprawling plot.

If the book has a weakness, it is the failure to bring the theme into more focus. The Rosteds are not world beaters. They are intelligent members of the aristocracy in the nineteenth century and of the upper middle class in the twentieth century, but they are not geniuses or great in any sense. Therefore their struggle to find truth in their lives is constantly doomed to less than complete success. Thorkild wrestles with life's verities in his endless writings, which he eventually burns. Holger and Grethe throw Bohemian parties and Holger paints, but only as a gentleman painter. Paula is a sculptor of no discernible talent and Philip deserted his creative side while still in college and became a businessman.

So no one in this novel ever has a sort of 'aha' moment. Rather they all fail to discover the whole truth and must learn to settle for that. While this is the situation that most of us find ourselves in, I thought that perhaps Leffland could have limned the theme a little more clearly. However, it is quite possible that I simply need to read the book again. It is a great temptation in the last third of the novel to read very quickly as many of the climaxes approach. I may well have missed some of the art in order to know the end of a sad and beautiful story.

Rating:
Summary: Something Missing
Review: The nine year wait for Ella Leffland's new novel has been worth its while. This three generations saga of a Danish family is at once unique and mesmerizing. "Take care!" Is the opening line. The words warn the reader--as much as the child clutching the cat, Olaf--to take care! Read this book with care! Nothing is quite what it seems. The leitmotif of the novel is finding continuity, permanence within this world of impermanence. The heroine, Grethe, muses that everything in life is fleeting, all goes somewhere, but where? The existential question of what will survive when we are gone, is repeated throughout this novel. Leffland's novel is provocative and sad, and at the same time strangely uplifting. There is rain and fog, ice and sleet, but there are also midsummer-nights and a plethora of flowers, "...Golden chains and bursts of fiery reds and lakes of blue, of violet, of sparkling white. ...Blooms bursting up everywhere." A little later Grethe thinks with a foreboding pensiveness, that "...these same blooms will only flake and shred and in their seeding decay give rise to more of the same." Leffland weaves order out of chaotic lives spanning three centuries, and leaves the reader to marvel at her ability to braid darkness with light. Sophocles' thought, "Man is but breath and shadow, nothing more," has given rise to Ella Leffland's finest book.

Rating:
Summary: Something Missing
Review: There were interesting and vital characters. There were three independent plots woven together by a very clever subplot. But something was missing. Theokild, Grethe, and Paula seemed to wander aimlessly for a little too long. I wanted to tell them to get out of their isolated worlds and find each other. Paula came the closest. I'm not asking for time-travel but the book needed a more unifying theme--perhaps their physical home or an animal?