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A review by nothingforpomegranted
Clothes on Their Backs by Linda Grant
4.0
This captivating short novel contained so much beauty and so much depth. Linda Grant's writing is stunning and subtle as she explores the concepts of identity and how we present ourselves to the world.
Vivien's assertion at the end of the novel that a new dress might be "all it takes to make a new beginning" is profound, a neat and cozy summary of the ways that clothing defined the characters of this novel.
The story begins and ends with Vivien's red dress, simple and bold, a costume for her character after the trials she has endures. Vivien's parents are plain, dressed in brown and dowdy outfits that match the brown and dowdy apartment that they never leave. The contrast with Sandor Kovacs, Vivien's estranged uncle, the infamous West Indian slumlord, is vast, marked when he knocks on the door in an electric-blue suit and a watch with glistening diamonds, shining into the dull apartment. Clothing remains a powerful motif, the subject of stunning essay that someone should write one day.
From Vivien's drab beginnings, we follow her into an exciting courtship and marriage to Alexander, remarkable in that it begins with no clothing at all. They are passionate, intellectual, and beautiful, a graceful relationship with the most bumbling of endings, a drama that reconciles Vivien with her showoffy uncle, who hires her to record his story, his memoirs, for posterity but mostly for his brother.
As the story jumps back in time to Sandor and Ervin's village childhoods in Hungary, we experience a sort of reverse coming of age. As an adult, Vivien comes to understand herself, her father, her mother, and her uncle in the context of their surroundings, the impact of a community even generations after the surroundings have changed and community has disappeared.
This book is beautiful, powerful, and extraordinarily elegant, a Holocaust story, an immigrant story, a woman's story unlike any I've read before and undeniably significant.
Vivien's assertion at the end of the novel that a new dress might be "all it takes to make a new beginning" is profound, a neat and cozy summary of the ways that clothing defined the characters of this novel.
The story begins and ends with Vivien's red dress, simple and bold, a costume for her character after the trials she has endures. Vivien's parents are plain, dressed in brown and dowdy outfits that match the brown and dowdy apartment that they never leave. The contrast with Sandor Kovacs, Vivien's estranged uncle, the infamous West Indian slumlord, is vast, marked when he knocks on the door in an electric-blue suit and a watch with glistening diamonds, shining into the dull apartment. Clothing remains a powerful motif, the subject of stunning essay that someone should write one day.
From Vivien's drab beginnings, we follow her into an exciting courtship and marriage to Alexander, remarkable in that it begins with no clothing at all. They are passionate, intellectual, and beautiful, a graceful relationship with the most bumbling of endings, a drama that reconciles Vivien with her showoffy uncle, who hires her to record his story, his memoirs, for posterity but mostly for his brother.
As the story jumps back in time to Sandor and Ervin's village childhoods in Hungary, we experience a sort of reverse coming of age. As an adult, Vivien comes to understand herself, her father, her mother, and her uncle in the context of their surroundings, the impact of a community even generations after the surroundings have changed and community has disappeared.
This book is beautiful, powerful, and extraordinarily elegant, a Holocaust story, an immigrant story, a woman's story unlike any I've read before and undeniably significant.