The Lost Letter by Jillian Cantor: Proof of Unusual Daring

I've discovered a favorite story frame.
I love that thing where action is going on in the past while people in the present are researching or investigating or uncovering that story from the past. And we, too, are having that past revealed to us slowly as the people in the present are being drawn in or effected in some way.
Ya know?

Not unlike how coolly Dan Brown did The DaVinci Code. That was excellently written.
 
Jillian Cantor pulls off this story frame beautifully in The Lost Letter.


Set in both the present in California, 1989, and the past, 1933 in Austria as the Nazis are moving into the countryside of Austria and spreading their antisemitic violence, The Lost Letter  tells of a young man named Kristoff who has come to apprentice with an Austrian master stamp maker named Frederick Faber. Kristoff, a young man who, as a baby, was orphaned, has come to the Faber household to learn the trade of making stamps, postage stamps, using the engraving tools of his mentor Frederick Faber. All the while, Kristoff is amazed with his supreme good fortune to experience the warmth of the Faber family, the kindness and goodness of Frederick, and the comforting family-focused rituals of the Faber's Jewish traditions carried out each week. The weekly traditions display the family bond in a way that Kristoff has never experienced or imagined before.

A non-Jew, Kristoff sees the violence wrought by the Germans while standing on a hill overlooking Vienna on the night known as Kristallnacht, the night that Vienna was destroyed by the Nazis leaving glass strewn across the streets and buildings destroyed by fire. On that night, Frederick had traveled to Vienna and is now missing. The Faber family panics and grieves, all while the Nazis begin to terrorize the small bergs in the Austrian country side. Seeing the utter devastation of Kristallnacht, Kristoff muses, It is called Kristallnacht but it should be called Night of Tears rather than Night of Glass.

As a result of Krystallnacht and the encroaching Nazis, Kristoff becomes aware that the Faber's elder daughter Elena has been involved in a resistance movement with small efforts to thwart the Nazis and to defend her beloved Austria. This story line is inspired by real resistance workers during World War II Austria and shows us the strength and great determination of Elena. She is quite an admirable young woman.

In 1989, we have a devastated young woman, Katie Nelson, still fragile and wounded from her husband Daniel leaving her because he can't tolerate the time she is spending with her father, an elderly philatelist who has developed Alzheimer's.* Katie's father Ted has recently entered into a nursing home because his Alzheimer's has made it necessary for him to have continuous care and Katie spends a great deal of time with him. Her mother died years ago and Katie has had a wonderfully loving relationship with her father for all of these years.

In Katie's first scene, we see her taking her father's letter and stamp collection to a philatelist, hoping to find something of value in order to help with her father's care. Carrying her crumbling pile of stamps and things into the stamp store, Katie meets the store's manager and master appraiser Benjamin who promises to review the collection and call her if he discovers anything interesting among Katie's father's stamp and letter collection. A gem. That's what Katie is hoping to discover in the collection: a gem.

I'm not completely certain why Katie brings that dusty pile of papers to the stamp guy, Benjamin, when she does. She is in a place of utter devastation. Her husband has abandoned her in a moment of need. She is losing her beloved father to the ravages of Alzheimers, slowly, surely losing him one day at at time. Perhaps she is seeking something meaningful in his strewn life detritus? Perhaps she is seeking memories in this place where her father is losing his...

Edelweiss

The book is called The Lost Letter because Benjamin, the stamp appraiser guy, discovers an unopened letter in the pile of stamps and whatnot with an enigmatic stamp, a stamp known to have been carved and circulated during the Nazi occupation of Austria, however this stamp seems to have a faint, hidden (?) outline of the Austrian flower blossom edelweiss. Furthermore, the stamp is placed upside down on the envelope, symbolically suggesting that the letter is a love letter from one to another. Katie and Benjamin are both intrigued and, after some further research, set off on a bit of a journey to discover more about the stamp, the stamp maker, and, ultimately, the letter itself.

We begin to understand that Kristoff and Elena, the eldest daughter of Ted Faber, are, in 1933, in a silent and growing romance in spite of the horror in which they are living. And we begin to understand that the letter we are holding, with the upside down stamp, the fading ink, and the crumbling paper, might contain a heartbreaking love letter between two separated lovers, never to see one another again in the devastating world of Nazi-occupied Austria. 

Furthermore, we begin to understand that a delicate alliance is forming between the gentle Katie and the wounded Benjamin, somehow allowing a whisper of healing and love. Can this lost letter bring something found? 


While I have not read anything else by Jillian Cantor, I imagine I'll be adding more of her books to my growing pile of Must Read books. In The Lost Letter, I thoroughly enjoy her historical flair, her incredibly emotive writing, the tender and the pragmatic, the horror and the beauty, the pain and the promise. It's a must read. 

I'm giving this book a rating of seven of ten stars.

 

Will you read it?
If so, I promise you'll discover the contents of the captivating letter.  😊

*  Yeah, Daniel never really improves in this book...

Octavia Butler's Kindred

One of my reading kinks is to learn as much as I can about the setting, author, historical events mentioned, etc, as I can while I am reading. I always look up new words and I highlight my favorite passages. I am a full-on book nerd.

So when I began reading Kindred  by award-winning sci-fi author Octavia Butler, I had to find out more about her. I mean, how many black, female sci-fi authors do you know? A multiple recipient of both the Hugo and Nebula awards, Octavia Butler became, in 1995, the first science-fiction writer to receive a MacArthur Fellowship, unofficially known as a Genius Grant, a prize awarded annually by the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation typically to between 20 and 30 individuals, working in any field, who have shown "extraordinary originality and dedication in their creative pursuits and a marked capacity for self-direction" and who are citizens or residents of the United States.
Cool. A genius.

So, yeah, let's learn a teeny bit about Octavia Butler first.

By age ten she was already writing and reading sci-fi, and begging her momma for a typewriter so she could write like a grown-up. She had a bunch of notebooks already full of her writing and ideas as a very young girl. While in college in 1965 she was involved in the Black Power Movement where she got the kernel of an idea that, eventually, became this book, Kindred. Her main message of the book, as summarized from several interviews, that the book is written to show how a person can learn subservience as well as dominance.

She went on to write Patternmaster (1976), Mind of My Mind (1977), Kindred (1979), Blood Child (1984) for which she won the Hugo Award, Imago (1989), Parable of the Sower (1993), Fledgling (2005), several sci-fi series books, and many, many other short stories and novels. Though most of her writing was straight up sci-fi including aliens, future wars, super humans, and vampires, an underlying theme of slavery, classism, racism, and diversity weaves through all of her writing. Octavia was, above all, a storyteller who used all she had in her to write stories that were born in her amazing mind.

I have not read any other book by Octavia Butler before this book Kindred.  Though I now know that Kindred  is a book often read by students in race relations classes in colleges across the country; wish I was in one of those classes now so I could participate in a discussion of the book. Alas, I am not so I will be relying on my own dang self to write this review.

The protag of Kindred  is a twenty-something newlywed author named Dana. She and her husband are in the middle of moving into a new home in California 1976 when she begins to feel funny, dizzy, squiggly. With very little warning she disappears to her husband and appears in a wooded area where she can see a river in front of her. In the river is a young boy drowning. Dana rushes into the river and rescues the boy, including bringing him onto shore and administering CPR and mouth-to-mouth to bring him back from the edge.

Unknown to her, here's a hint, she has now time-traveled to 1815 Maryland. The boy she just saved is her ancestor, the son of a plantation owner. The boy's mother accuses Dana of wrong deeds that are untoward coming from a black woman and Dana is immediately on the defensive. She immediately begins to see that she is not in Kansas anymore. A few hours of recovery by the little boy, Rufus, and Dana is pulled back to her own living room with her husband watching her reappear. To him the episode lasted two minutes; to Dana it was several hours.

Over the course of the book both Dana and her husband Kevin move back and forth between their home and the plantation in Maryland. The interesting thing about this time travel is that, though Dana and her husband are tossed through time abruptly and for extended periods of time, these characters seem to accept this travel with waaay less freaking out than I think I would do. But, to be fair, in the past, Dana is constantly having to figure out how to move through whatever crisis she is thrown into, through antebellum slavery, and through the plantation politics of the time.

Each time Dana is pulled back into the past, into Rufus's life, it is because Rufus is in some life-threatening danger and Dana is there to rescue him. As we get to know Rufus better, the son of a typical plantation owner, slave owner, slave abuser, we begin to see that Rufus is, in some ways, as much a victim of his father's philosophy as are the slaves he "owns", many of whom we get to know fairly intimately in this book.

Rufus and Dana's relationship is an odd one, one I can only compare to the relationship of some characters in a book by Mary Doria Russell's book The Sparrow, slave and master, yet not. Equals, yet not. Educated human being verses differently-educated person holding power over them. Even while Rufus relies on Dana for emotional connection and guidance he is still the son of a slave owner and he behaves as such. We begin to hope that the actions and the teachings and the modeling of Dana to Rufus will have a large and a profoundly changing influence on him as he, one day, will inherit the plantation, and therefore, the people.

We also hope, as we learn about the other relationships in this slave narrative, that good things will happen to the people that we have come to know and love. Yet their circumstances do not bode well and our hearts, as we expect, will break.

One of my favorite quotes in the books comes from Dana musing about Rufus's father, Tom Weylin, and his general behavior as a slave owner: 

 His father wasn't the monster he could have been with with the power he held over his slaves. He wasn't a monster at all. Just an ordinary man who sometimes did the monstrous things his society told him were legal and proper. But I had seen no particular fairness in him. He did as he pleased. If you told him he wasn't being fair, he would whip you for it.

It's clear that Octavia Butler put a great deal of emotional research into the writing of this book. However, without having read any of her other books, and being a lover of good writing, I must own that I don't care for her writing. I did love the story. I loved the concept. I was hooked on the storyline. I read the book like greased lightening. But... her writing simply did not live up to what I would have liked. Maybe her style reads better in sci-fi and aliens..?

Still I enjoyed the book and I was moved by the humanity...and by the lack of it in characters. In fact, I would love to have seen more of some of the secondary characters in the book. In fact, I felt that there were many pregnant untold stories in this book that I would have loved to see some bones to. There is some beautiful symbolism in some of the actions in the book and a good deal of thoughtful prose. I continue to be appalled at the behavior of human beings who cannot or who do not acknowledge the equality of all human beings on the planet, with zero exceptions. And one must also see the threads of slavery that continue to run through our 2018 America. I wonder what Octavia Butler would make of our current administration.

I give this book five stars.
I wanted to give it higher, but the writing was a real and continuous draw back for me.

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Kindred by Octavia Butler

I've been reading quite alot lately, mostly post-apocalyptic thrillers and the like (for some WEIRD reason! lol) but I've finally the need to switch gears. Having no idea where to go next, I picked up these books at the library this weekend and, because they all sounded fascinating, I deliberated on which book to read first for a day or two! I read reviews and Amazon pages and looked through each book; it was a tough call! I finally chose the winner: Kindred by Octavia Butler (1979).

The reviews on Amazon are extremely high, the time travel/historical fiction idea is interesting and unique, and the subject matter is compelling.

Dana, a 1976 feminist woman, is, several times, transported through time and space to Maryland in 1815, at the height of slavery times. As a black woman, she is treated with disrespect, disdain, and, eventually, fear as she can both read and write, she is obviously educated beyond what most white people were from that time, she is wearing pants, and she knows events from history that are not known to the common man of the time. Dana fears for her own safety, as well as the safety of people the she discovers to be her ancestors.

At this point, I am about half way through, I am hoping that her ancestor Rufus becomes a much better version of himself after meeting Dana and being influenced by her. I'm hoping to see a reunion of two characters who have not seen one another in many years, and I'm hoping that the writing improves. The story itself is keeping me very interested while the writing is a bit disappointing and lackluster.

I should be back in a day or two with my review.  😊

Dreamers of the Day: A Novel by Mary Doria Russell

It all started when a friend was visiting and we were having a conversation about his passion, history. I had no knowledge or recollection of learning about the 1921 Cairo Peace Conference and Ron was explaining the reason the Cairo Peace Conference had everything to do with the current conflict in the Middle East. That made no sense to me until Ron explained it. I mean, Paris and Syria? What possible connection could there be?

Embarrassingly, I have a rather poor grasp of important moments in history. I'm trying to repair that. My conversations with Ron and my reading of this book  helped immensely.
Thank you, Ron. And Thank you, Mary.

So, the day following Ron's teachable moment with me, I picked up a book that I had had on my side table, a book that was simply next. I can't adequately express my surprise to discover that Mary Doria Russell's book Dreamers of the Day: A Novel was actually set during and around the freaking 1921 Cairo Peace Conference! Life is freaky and serendipitous and I just about shouted in excitement as I discovered more and more about this book and how prepared  I was to read it.

Enter a completely average school teacher from Middle America 1920, Agnes, who, because of a minor inheritance, is able to take herself on a fabulous dream vacation to a place that is to become a major location of world events, a place where she will tangle with important people and major issues, a vacation that will embolden her and change her very identity, all in one hot season. Before the end of her first week in Cairo she will be supping with Winston Churchill and others who were the key players in these momentous weeks.

The location of this book, the beauty of Cairo and the Middle East, plays a character in this book. It turns out Mary Doria Russell has yet to step foot on Cairo soil, but the reader will be as surprised by this fact as I was because I felt completely transported. From the blistering heat and unpleasantness of air conditioner-free Egypt to dark, rich coffee houses and parties, boat rides down the Nile, to dusty pyramids, the reader will be utterly saturated in the sensory explosion of Egypt and the Holy Lands. Furthermore, Russell's understanding of and explanation of the issues of the time, just wow. She made it possible for me to understand why there is such fanaticism and fear in the Middle East in 2018.

Mary Doria Russell's love of research carries the reader forward into this intimate experience of the far-reaching concerns of the Cairo Peace Conference, which, you will learn, was a series of meetings in the spring of 1921 by Britain's higher ups to determine what was to be the policy for dealing with and managing the Middle East. In our online friendship, I asked her why she had chosen this particular time and place to set a book and she told me that she had found herself wondering, one day, how the Middle East had become such a stewing cauldron of complex conflict, characters, and culture. She was also fascinated that this historic moment in time had never been fully explored by any other author. Mary decided that this rich tapestry of historical things would be a wonderful setting for her next book.

One of my favorite things about historical fiction is when an author can take the reader on a journey with real people, during real events, giving us an insiders knowledge of the proceedings without losing the fiction part of historical fiction. Through conversation, musings, journeys, and asides, we gain a rich appreciation for this pregnant moment in time. In Dreamers of the Day, it is Agnes, the fearless narrator of the book, that is the fiction. From Agnes's vantage point of after-death, she is able to give us an insiders view as well as giving us the long perspective of looking back at the event, as well as looking back at her own empowerment as a woman of the time. Now, if that isn't brilliant writing, I don't know what is.

One of my favorite quotes from this book comes from a character that I have failed to mention thus far, a spy named Karl who becomes involved with Agnes. The two of them have lengthy and wonderful conversations as only those in the unexpectedly exotic romance of a foreign country that can have over coffee, tea, or more. Karl introduces Agnes to many ideas that challenges her and opens her mind and her life (for a woman from 1920s Ohio, this is an extremely rare opportunity!). 

At one point in an intimate conversation between Agnes and Karl, he delivers the line Frankly, I think the world will be a better place when science has swept all religion into the dustbin of history. What is religion but a shared belief in things that cannot be known? When we substitute concurrence for fact, fantasy quickly replaces knowledge. Why? Because knowledge is much more trouble to acquire!  Dear Agnes learns, not only of atheism and historical Christianity, but also of Islam from our intrepid, romantic, and learned cloak-and-dagger man.

Lady Gertrude Bell

While reading historical fiction of this caliber I love to research every single person, place, event, and thing that is real in history and I had a field day with this book. I especially enjoyed reading about TE Lawrence or Lawrence of Arabia. I had no idea that this character that I think of as Peter O'Toole was such a pivotal part of the proceedings. Nor did I know about Lady Gertrude Bell, now one of my favorite political scientists, historians, cultural advisor, and feminists.

 
Although there was a section or two of the book that I found challenging to my attention span, I have to give this book a solid 7 stars and a recommendation to READ IT if you love historical fiction. Use it as a beginning place for your own research into the current conflict in Syria. I give this book a seven because I have read other books by Russell and I ADORE her writing and I thought this one was a lovely quiet book that clarified some complex issues. And remember to check out other books by Mary Doria Russell, one of THE best writers to come along in a very long time. She is the author of one of the top books on my top ten favorite books list, The Sparrow.

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