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A review by emmkayt
Hope: A Tragedy by Shalom Auslander
4.0
Solomon Kugel, who obsessively keeps a notebook in which he jots down potential last words for his dying moments, buys a suspiciously cheap farmhouse in a small town. His relationship with his wife is strained, in part because his mother has moved in: mom is American-born and raised, born in 1945 in fact, but she insists she is a Holocaust survivor and engages in antics like waking up screaming every morning because she read it to be common among survivors. As if that weren't strain enough, one night Kugel discovers that there's someone living in their attic: Anne Frank, elderly, demanding, and working on her new book.
Sometimes I lean to 3.5 stars, sometimes to 5: I think that makes it a 4... This is funny (I may well have chortled) and also serious, in that Auslander deals with difficult issues about history, memory (whose?), identity politics, and while he's at it, you know, the meaning of life, death, and, as per the title, hope. Very interesting to think about. Rather weaker in terms of character and plot, beyond the initial set-up, and a bit repetitive. Certainly the characters are there to serve a purpose and make a point, rather than to do what people do or exhibit much in the way of interesting layers.
Sometimes I lean to 3.5 stars, sometimes to 5: I think that makes it a 4... This is funny (I may well have chortled) and also serious, in that Auslander deals with difficult issues about history, memory (whose?), identity politics, and while he's at it, you know, the meaning of life, death, and, as per the title, hope. Very interesting to think about. Rather weaker in terms of character and plot, beyond the initial set-up, and a bit repetitive. Certainly the characters are there to serve a purpose and make a point, rather than to do what people do or exhibit much in the way of interesting layers.