Notes & Essays by David Rodeback, Writing, Language & Books

Chris Cleave’s Everyone Brave is Forgiven

Two novels I’ve read in the past year stand head and shoulders above the rest.

The first is Chaim Potok’s The Chosen, published in 1967. The only surprise here, if you know my literary tastes, is that it took me nearly half a century to pick up and read this classic exploration of religious life. There are certain gaps in my literary experience, I readily admit — but this is no longer one of them.

(Another conspicuous gap is J. D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye (1951). I know it is had for both good and evil, and was banned within my lifetime in a certain Washington school district for being part of a communist plot. All the same, a young writer I met at lunch a few weeks ago talked me into reading it sooner rather than later. I’m too old, among other things, to be drawn to it for its rebellion and teenage angst, but it has other charms. After reading just the first two pages, I’m inclined to appreciate — and to study — the first-person narrative voice. But I digress.)

The second highlight of this year’s novel-reading is Chris Cleave’s Everyone Brave Is Forgiven, first released not five months ago. Cleave’s first three novels, which I haven’t read, were well received and have contemporary settings. This fourth offering is historical fiction, set in England and Malta during the early years of World War II — mostly before the United States joined the conflagration in December 1941.

Everyone Brave Is Forgiven, Chris Cleave

This book is delightful but substantial reading. Though often light-hearted, at times it is grimly realistic and personal about the physical, emotional, and moral horrors of war. It has some thoughts on race and class, but (thankfully) isn’t heavy-handed about them. This virtue displeased the subset of reviewers who declare even a brilliant novel disappointing, if it does not bludgeon the reader with proper and comprehensive modern views of any social issues it happens to touch.

Notes & Essays by David Rodeback, Writing, Language & Books

Review: John Garrard and Carol Garrard, The Bones of Berdichev: The Life and Fate of Vasily Grossman

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Years ago, I tried my hand at a few book reviews. Here is one of them, because I think it still has merit, and because I need some content to test the function of this web site I’m building. This was previously published at an old site of mine, BookishThoughts.com.

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Hardback: 436 pages. Free Press, 1999. ISBN: 0684822954.

Vasily Grossman (1905-1964) is among my favorite authors, and his best novel, Life and Fate, is my favorite twentieth century novel. (It is available in English translation, though it deserves a better translation than it has received to date.) Grossman’s reputation in Russia deservedly eclipses Solzhenitsyn’s and Pasternak’s, though his work is little known in the English-speaking world. Life and Fate is many things – an 800-page novel can afford to be – but, above all, it is as profound a statement on human freedom as I have ever read.

The Bones of Berdichev is a the first book-length biography of Grossman in English. The title refers to Berdichev, a city in Ukraine, where more than 18,000 Jews were slaughtered in three days in September 1941. One of them was Grossman’s mother. But this is not only a biography; it is also a history of the Holocaust, from a very personal viewpoint. As such, it is not light or enjoyable reading; it is dark, deeply moving, rewarding reading.

Grossman is nearly always in the foreground, but the Holocaust looms large, as it did for him, through his years as a renowned and gifted war correspondent, and through the official disgrace in which he lived his last years, as punishment for writing things the Soviet government did not want to be written.

As the Garrards note, “Grossman was in fact a man of deep contradictions, like the times in which he lived. His was a life full of moral, cultural and philosophical conflicts.” Such a life is interesting enough, but there is more. This is the life of “a human being who went through the fires of hell and emerged with his soul intact.” There is, therefore, much to admire, and much to learn.

In the Preface the Garrards demonstrate an unfortunate tendency to preach, but after that, this is as fine a scholarly biography as one might hope to encounter.