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Loading... Far to Go (2010)by Alison Pick
  
 Dabble58 | Nov 11, 2023 |    ) GaylaBassham | May 27, 2018 |  ) jjaylynny | Nov 12, 2016 | ) gayla.bassham | Nov 7, 2016 |  ) Smits | Jun 21, 2016 |
 The year is 1938. Betrayed at Munich by European countries desperate to appease Hitler — “Peace in our time,” infamously crowed Neville Chamberlain — Czechoslovakia is about to be invaded by Germany. Toronto poet and novelist Alison Pick dissects this national tragedy in a multilayered narrative, a tale of betrayals large and small, that focuses on the fates of the Bauers, secular Czech Jews. So much has been written about the Holocaust. Still, Pick, born in 1975 in Toronto and inspired by her Czech grandparents’ grueling five-year journey to Canada, spins a mesmerizing story, threading the personal with the political, the mysterious with the factual. It’s a page-turner  Allison Pick brings her award-winning poetic sensibilities to a difficult historical subject in Far to Go. A complex story of a family’s struggle set against the backdrop of the Nazi takeover of Czechoslovakia’s Sudetenland, the novel focuses on the Bauer family, secular Jews caught in the rise of anti-Semitism... Among readers of serious fiction, Jews and non-Jews, many cringe at the prospect of another novel centred on the Holocaust. Enough already, they moan. Is there anything new to be said? Move on, they urge. And yet. And yet. By delicately tilting her observer’s mirror, Alison Pick glimpsed the outline of an original tale that could cast new light on old shadows — enough, I argue, that even the Holocaust-saturated will admit there’s room for more of these stories if their vantage point is well chosen....Pick wrote an earlier novel and several books of poetry. You might expect a few narrative arabesques; instead there are prosaic pratfalls, tired metaphors and similes, many involving fruit. A group of teenagers are “clustered together like grapes,” something inside of Marta hardens “like the pit at the centre of a piece of summer fruit” and then tightens “like the lid on a Mason jar.” Her story deserves more careful language....So the Holocaust persists in the literary imagination and through the refining fire of fiction a new generation confronts its own version of what it means to be human. . The writing in Far to Go is clean, crisp and unencumbered. Pick never dwells for too long in an image or metaphor, and she creates small moments that are both lovely and frightening. At slightly more than 300 pages, the book resists the urge to overstay its welcome. It’s very deftly structured and the storytelling is seamless. With rights sold in the United States, Britain, Holland and Italy, Far to Go appears poised to gain a wide and significant readership, and deservedly so.
"When Czechoslovakia relinquishes the Sudetenland to Hitler, the powerful influence of Nazi propaganda sweeps through towns and villages like a sinister vanguard of the Reich's advancing army. A fiercely patriotic secular Jew, Pavel Bauer is helpless to prevent his world from unraveling as first his government, then his business partners, then his neighbors turn their back on his affluent, once-beloved family. Only the Bauers' adoring governess, Marta, sticks by Pavel, his wife, Anneliese, and their little son, Pepik, bound by her deep affection for her employers and friends. But when Marta learns of their impending betrayal at the hands of her lover, Ernst, Pavel's best friend, she is paralyzed by her own fear of discovery -- even as the endangered family for whom she cares so deeply struggles with the most difficult decision of their lives. Interwoven with a present-day narrative that gradually reveals the fate of the Bauer family during and after the war, Far to Go is a riveting family epic, love story, and psychological drama"--Back cover. No library descriptions found. |
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 Google Books — Loading...GenresMelvil Decimal System (DDC)813.6Literature English (North America) American fiction 21st CenturyLC ClassificationRatingAverage: (3.71)
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Far to Go by Alison Pick
Wikipedia in English
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It is so well done! Though most of the characters were unsympathetic, I could not help but feel for them all, tied as they were to a doom so all-encompassing.
Throughout the book there are excerpts from the family letters, unfailingly ended with a postscript of their name, date of death, camp where killed.
I have been aware of the tragedy of Ww2 all of my life, I even lived in Germany for some time and was vaguely revolted by the way the fruit trees were so fertile (all that blood meal?). But this story affected me quite strongly and it is for that reason I highly recommend it. It is far too easy as time goes on to forget the inhumanity that occurred (and to be fair, is still occurring, with different victims and perpetrators). Sometimes a good story brings it all back, reminds us of how close we dance to a similar situation as fascism returns, as prejudice creates violence, as we watch it go by without comment. This story is a good, involving, and thought-provoking slap upside the head.
The ending has surprises but it will be the characters that pull you on.
Definitely worth a read. (