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A review by eowyns_helmet
City of Secrets by Stewart O'Nan
A beautiful, nuanced, engrossing read. The story is set in a post-World War II Jerusalem still occupied by the Brits, among Jewish guerrillas allied in a cell that carry out bombings meant to shake loose the occupiers and create an independent Israel.
But as reviewers have noted the writing is spare, quiet, with a pervasive melancholy. It seems everyone, including the Latvian refugee Brand, is deeply damaged, just trying to reconstruct a simple life with simple pleasures. But the ghosts of the past haunt everyone and the violence is quick and severe, lurid in its intensity. In our current hyper confessional culture, the reserve of those who have seen and suffered atrocities is searing.
I marked many passages. Here is O'Nan writing about what it means to be a survivor. "He wasn't weak enough to kill himself, but wasn't strong enough to stop wanting to. There was always the question of what to do with his old life, memory seething in him like a disease. Not only his sorrow, but the guard stomping on Koppelman's face, the dog shaking the child, the wheels of the train slicing the idiot Gypsy boy in two -- atrocities so commonplace that no one wanted to hear them. Everything he'd witnessed was his now, indelible yet unspeakable. His best chance was to forget, and so he kept on, letting the meaningless present distract him."
WOW.
O'Nan doesn't give more detail about any of these events, making them all the stronger for being shards of memory. Later, he revisits one memory in more depth, the site of the massacre where Brand's wife was likely murdered. After Brand's release from the camp, "he'd taken to the train out through the leafy countryside to Crow Forest the same way they'd been marched in the snow, but the ground had been dug up by the Russians, the bodies carted away in dump trucks and tipped into secret graves with the German dead, a second desecration. He walked the turned earth, searching for a scrap of cloth, a button, the steel frames from a pair of eyeglasses, any clue as to what had happened there. It was May and the first shoots of grass had sprung up, fringing the mounds with green. All around, weeds and thistles grew knee-high, thriving reminders of the relentless business of life. He stood in the clearing, looking at the trees on all sides reaching for the sun, the birds flitting from branch to branch, calling to one another, and knew he had to leave."
On a smaller level, I noticed how the place names gave so much texture -- Queen Melisande's Way, Kilimanjaro Supper Club, Zion Gate, Street of the Martyrs.
But as reviewers have noted the writing is spare, quiet, with a pervasive melancholy. It seems everyone, including the Latvian refugee Brand, is deeply damaged, just trying to reconstruct a simple life with simple pleasures. But the ghosts of the past haunt everyone and the violence is quick and severe, lurid in its intensity. In our current hyper confessional culture, the reserve of those who have seen and suffered atrocities is searing.
I marked many passages. Here is O'Nan writing about what it means to be a survivor. "He wasn't weak enough to kill himself, but wasn't strong enough to stop wanting to. There was always the question of what to do with his old life, memory seething in him like a disease. Not only his sorrow, but the guard stomping on Koppelman's face, the dog shaking the child, the wheels of the train slicing the idiot Gypsy boy in two -- atrocities so commonplace that no one wanted to hear them. Everything he'd witnessed was his now, indelible yet unspeakable. His best chance was to forget, and so he kept on, letting the meaningless present distract him."
WOW.
O'Nan doesn't give more detail about any of these events, making them all the stronger for being shards of memory. Later, he revisits one memory in more depth, the site of the massacre where Brand's wife was likely murdered. After Brand's release from the camp, "he'd taken to the train out through the leafy countryside to Crow Forest the same way they'd been marched in the snow, but the ground had been dug up by the Russians, the bodies carted away in dump trucks and tipped into secret graves with the German dead, a second desecration. He walked the turned earth, searching for a scrap of cloth, a button, the steel frames from a pair of eyeglasses, any clue as to what had happened there. It was May and the first shoots of grass had sprung up, fringing the mounds with green. All around, weeds and thistles grew knee-high, thriving reminders of the relentless business of life. He stood in the clearing, looking at the trees on all sides reaching for the sun, the birds flitting from branch to branch, calling to one another, and knew he had to leave."
On a smaller level, I noticed how the place names gave so much texture -- Queen Melisande's Way, Kilimanjaro Supper Club, Zion Gate, Street of the Martyrs.