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by Suzanne Buchert
The March by E.L. Doctorow & The Book Thief by Markus Zusak “The March” by E. L. Doctorow begins “At five in the morning someone banging on the door and shouting, her husband, John, leaping out of bed, grabbing his rifle, and Roscoe at the same time roused from the backhouse, his bare feet pounding Mattie hurriedly pulled on her robe, her mind prepared for the alarm of war, but the heart stricken that it would finally have come, and down the stairs she flew to see through the open door in the lamplight, at the steps of the portico, the two horses, steam rising from their flanks, their heads lifting, their eyes wild, the driver a young darkie with rounded shoulders, showing stolid patience even I this, and the woman standing in her carriage no one but her aunt Letitia Petttibone of McDonough, her elderly face drawn in anguish, her hair a straggled mess, this woman of such fine grooming, this dowager who practically ruled the season in Atlanta standing up in the equipage like some hag of doom, which indeed she would prove to be.” “First the colors. Then the humans. That’s usually how I see things. Or at least, how I try.” These are the first lines of “The Book Thief” by Markus Zusak.
This month’s reviews are both books about people living through wars. Not war in a distant country; war in their own backyard, their own street, their own house. I had nearly crossed Doctorow off my reading list after an attempt to read his last book, “City of God”. I gave it a fighting chance, reading on after I had really lost interest. I never quit without reading a reasonable section, giving the book every opportunity to make me want to continue. Finally, if that doesn’t happen, I close the book, and pick up one of the other books patiently waiting on my shelf. I have read a fair number of books by Doctorow, most riding on the strength of the incredible “Ragtime”. “The Book of Daniel” was the first follow up and I thoroughly enjoyed it probably due to my interest in the Rosenberg’s. The Daniel of the book was one of the sons of Ethel and Julius Rosenberg, famously executed during the 1950’s as spies for the Communists. I, along with the son in the book, wanted to believe in the innocence of the Rosenberg’s. Recent revelations from the former Soviet Union seem to prove otherwise, but it was a not uncommon theory that they had been railroaded, framed, what have you, due to the frenzied anti-communism of the era. A number of Doctorow’s following books were so-so. Nothing to get excited about. “The March” was getting a lot of press, and so I decided to give it a shot. I am very glad I did. It is an excellent characterization of the southern experience of war in their own backyards. While both northerners and southerners were depicted along the way in the book, which follows the famous march of General Sherman through Georgia, the strongest and surprisingly, to me, most sympathetic characters were southerners. It is the kind of book that makes me wish for a sequel, to pick up the unfinished stories of the people who I have come to care about. Sort of like what happened after Rhett walked out on Scarlet in “Gone With the Wind”. Of course, when those “sequels” come out decades after the original book, written by some other writer, I cringe and consider them imposters. Don’t be intimidated by the incredibly long sentence quoted in the first lines. This is a very readable, straightforward book. Even though it traces the actions of several characters during the time period of the march, they are generally easy to follow and intersect occasionally bringing the threads of the story together into a whole. “The Book Thief” is also a book with lots of press. I thought the premise, a young girl living in Nazi Germany during World War II who steals books that would otherwise be burned, to be full of promise. Then I read an excerpt, which I didn’t like at all. The author used a literary device to tell the story. Death was his narrator. I don’t like such oddities. Just tell the darn story and leave out all the cutsie stuff! Anyway, in spite of the, to me, annoying interruption of death as narrator, the story was a good one. This book is one that grabbed my attention right away. I have read, we have all read, books about WWII and it’s horrors. Just read “The Diary of Anne Frank” and you have the quintessential WWII book. However, this book has something to say that I found worth listening to. I hope I won’t be giving too much away by saying that neither book ended as badly as I had expected. There was plenty of dying in these wars nearly a century apart. Wars go on, people continue to treat each other badly, often in the name of their beliefs. How that can be is a mystery to me. The optimist me thinks knowing what has been done in the past would make people more tolerant, more humane. But it isn’t so. Keep reading, keep thinking, keep hoping…..
Suzanne Buchert and her husband, Keith, own several restaurants.
sbuchert@hotmail.com
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