A pageturner, for sure. A nearly-grown-up malcontent escapé from the Gifted and Talented track makes his way to a magic school and then to not!Narnia? Sign me up!
The prose is tight, fun, unique, and rollicking. The worldbuilding is interesting – it knowingly sacrifices originality for wink-and-nudge callbacks, referencing Harry Potter, Narnia, Lord of the Rings, Earthsea, and (possibly) the film Pan's Labyrinth. The imagery was often extremely vivid, and immersive – I often felt like I was physically there, on the welters court, in a snowfield, cruising at altitude above the world. And I wanted desperately, at all times, to know what would happen next.
In the end, though, I was left feeling cold. Quentin didn't seem to experience much personal growth through the 400-some pages of the book, despite going through incredible numbers of unique and challenging experiences over four or five years in total. However, he seemd to accrue only trauma, and little wisdom, by the end of the book. I found him more difficult to like the more time passed in the story; surely, I kept thinking, now he'll begin to grow as a person. But it never really happened.
The other characters often felt thinly written, too. They were so dynamic that I wanted to know more about their inner lives, but these were only ever hinted at. They seemed to exist mostly as foils to or supports for Quentin, which in the case of Alice was particularly disappointing, given how her story ultimately shook out.
I enjoyed this, but I'm not sure I'd recommend it.
I got about a third of the way through this before a) it was recalled by the library and b) I got bored. I was excited to read this because because so many readers had sung its praises and becauseI remembered liking Circe, but I found the main character dull and the love interest even duller. Maybe I'll give it another go someday, but as it stands I'm not really sure what people like about this book beyond the concept.
A very quick read, and enjoyable. Like much of Stavans' work, there's nearly as much memoir as there is history, but so long as you like Stavans' personality, this is not a bad thing. I would have liked more information on linguistics, but that's not this book; unfortunately, linguistics and linguistic anthropology coverage is a little thin on the ground. But Stavans is an engaging writer and this book is very accessible. A good read for Shabbat, if you keep it.
I did not expect to like this book. My grandmother, like innumerable North American Jewish grandmothers, recommends books to me and the rest of the family ceaselessly, especially books about Jewish history (or fictionalized history). But frankly I rarely like her recommendations; often I sense that they're going to be sort of saccharine, shallow treatments. (Whether this is fair of me is another thing entirely.) This book, I'm happy to say, was none of those things.
This is a complex story by an author who is deeply ambivalent about his family's history, especially the Jewish part of his family. I, being the descendent of poor and classless Ostjüden from Galicia and even further east, can't relate to the tale of vast intergenerational wealth and the great Jewish families of France and Germany. And in part because those stories have nothing to do with my personal family history, I've had little interest in hearing them, little interest in learning about the fabulously wealthy and privileged few whose hypervisible lifestyles provided (and, sadly, continue to provide) ample ammunition for antisemites. But this book made me understand why someone might care.
This is not a story about objets d'art. It's not even really necessary for the reader to have an interest in the history of Western fine art, or in Japanese traditional crafts and fine art. But the use of art as a framework for exploring the lives of de Waal's ancestors, and the netsuke as a sort of personified motif, work beautifully as entry points into what is really a story about relating to something much bigger, much older, and much more complex than you, and something to which you had not managed to give much thought prior to the entrance of 264 tiny plot devices.
It's simultaneously a bit disappointing, deeply moving, and totally inevitable that the book effectively finds its climax in the Shoah (Holocaust). It's difficult for anyone writing after 1947 to see the events of the 20th century prior to WWII as anything but a prelude to it, especially for Jews and even more so for Jews whose family history is in Europe. So the story of a Great Family, undone by a hopeless faith in assimilation, by antisemitism, and by war, is nothing new. But I was moved nonetheless, by de Waal's prickly ambivalence over the ostentatiousness of the lives of wealth lived by his ancestors (how very un-English! how stereotypically Jewish!) which melted into a deep empathy for and identification with Charles Efrussi, the Parisian art obsessive, via the albatross of his (de Waal's) inheritance.
Anyway, before this gets any more longwinded and pretentious, I'll end this by saying that I couldn't care less about the trials and tribulations of the scions of the wealthy Jewish families of Mitteleuropa in the 19th and early 20th centuries. But this book humanized this family, and gave me an insight into what this period looked like from the perspective of that proverbial Other Half, and why that matters. The simple fact that assimilation ultimately makes no difference when the chips are down was lesson enough, but the beauty of this story is that it was so much more than that. It gave voice to a part of history that's totally gone, present now only in archives and libraries full of the meticulous detritus of the Nazi regime, and through the stories related by those few descendants who care about not only the material remnants of that past, but by how the erstwhile owners of those remnants felt.
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