Hello, bookworms! I'm Hannah, and I'm changing the lighting setup in my next
few videos, because I started recording a few minutes ago and one of my lightbulbs
exploded. Burning hot glass went raining down and set the carpet on fire. That was
terrifying. I'm trembling right now, but I have a lot of work to do today so I'm
going to soldier on and get through this video. Today is my first dedicated review
of a 2018 Women's Prize longlist book. I'll be giving a brief synopsis,
introducing the characters, and discussing the book's strengths and
weaknesses. As usual, I'll avoid dropping any major spoilers, and I'll do my best to
correctly pronounce the characters names,
but if I get any wrong I hope you'll
forgive me. Today I'm reviewing A Boy in Winter by Rachel Seiffert. This is
Seiffert's fifth novel. Her debut novel, The Dark Room, was shortlisted for The
Man Booker Prize in 2001, and her third novel, Afterwards, was longlisted for the
Women's Prize in 2007, back when he was known as the Orange Prize for Fiction. A
Boy in Winter is historical fiction set during the German invasion of Ukraine in
1941. Though the synopsis suggests the book will follow four characters, it
actually jumps around to six, technically seven, different characters. Right now
some of you are thinking, "Wait a minute, six characters in a book that's not even
240 pages long? Is it even possible to feel invested in so many characters in
so few pages ?" The answer to that question is: No. Let's start at the beginning.
This year's women's prize longlist left me feeling deflated.
I posted a candid longlist reaction video. If you missed that, I'll link to it
in the description box. When determining which books from the longlist to read, A
Boy in Winter caught my eye, because it's opening pages give an immediate sense of
atmosphere and peril and reveal a unique linguistic style.
Seiffert demonstrates a quirky dependency on semicolons and colons which, to be
frank, my eyes were tripping over throughout the book, and her writing
oscillates between short, jagged sentences and long flowing sentences
laden with commas, We open on the hushed streets of a small Ukranian town where
the air is damp with fog. A young boy and his little brother
are running through the empty cobbled streets in search of a place to hide. The
eponymous "boy" is the oldest: 13 year old Yankel, a Jewish boy prone to daydreaming
who prefers afternoon spent in long grass along the river banks or wading in
the shallows. He's a brave and nurturing older brother who often whittled sticks
into figurines for his younger brother Momik. We're then introduced to a German
engineer named Otto who's woken by the sound of slamming doors outside his
boarding-house window. In the last few days he's witnessed the arrival of SS
Jeeps, then the Order Police, and now the
streets are filling with the gray uniformed Wermacht. We get a sense
of Otto's character and his view of the war through inward conversations he has
with his beloved wife. Otto is implacably opposed to his
countrymen's behavior but keeps his thoughts safely in his head because the
letters he writes home to his wife are monitored by German soldiers. We next
meet my favorite character in the book: a 17 year old Ukranian farm girl named Yasia. Her introduction is accompanied by a wailing siren and the crack of a
German voice over a loudspeaker announcing, in Ukrainian, that a curfew is
in effect until further notice. Through Yasia's conversations with her father
were reminded of Stalin's brutal reign, and we learned that she's resentful of
the war because her sweetheart, Mykola, has been gone fighting for the Red Army. Were it not for the war she would be married by now and happily cradling a
plump baby. Finally, we're introduced to Yankel's
father, Ephraim. He, his wife, and his youngest daughter have been herded like
animals, along with hundreds of other Jews, to an old brick factory where he
waits anxiously for news of Yankel and Momik. It's through Ephraim's
wandering thoughts that we learn more about Yankel's character and how it's
been difficult for Ephraim in recent years to convince his son to focus on
learning when all Yankel wants to do is play outside. We also, in brief stints,
follow a schoolmaster; Mykola, who's told that his service in the Red Army will be
forgiven if he'll fight for the Germans; and Arnold, a military superior with whom
Otto occasionally confers. By weaving these characters' stories together,
Seiffert attempts to explore, and I'm quoting the book jacket here, "the
compromises demanded by survival, the oppressive power of fear, and the
possibility of courage in the face of terror." Two important questions arise
when considering this book. (1) Does Seiffert succeed in honoring what the
book jacket promises? I think the answer is yes, but the execution is weak; and (2)
Can this book compete with the pantheon of Holocaust literature that already exists?
I think the answer is no. Before I explain why, let me first touch on the
aspects of the book I enjoyed. Seiffert's prose regularly transports us from one
scene to the next. When following Yankel, we feel the dampness of the
fog around us. Yasia cuts into an apple to reveal its pale flesh, and suddenly
we're craving the sweetness of apples. Ephraim is pressed and pushed in the
crowded factory. His back aches, his joints stiffen, and we shift our weight
from foot to foot right alongside him. Most of these characters don't know one
another at the start of the book, so they're ignorant of how connected they
are. They're not concerned with one another's welfare until their paths
physically cross. It feels long in cinubgm which is funny given how short
this book is, but some of the most thrilling moments in the book occur when
these characters finally collide. My favorite moment is shared between Yasia,
Yankel, and Momik. It's the only scene in the entire book where I was quietly
spellbound. The boys are hiding in a workshop and Yasia offers them to
deviled eggs. The small one edges towards her shyly, reaching for the food. One hand
still full of his new toy, he has to give it to Yasia to make room and she takes
it from him gently, pressing an egg into each of his palms in exchange. Such fine
little digits; she likes to see them gripped like that, to see all the
neatness of his small child's movements. An egg makes a good warm fistful, she
thinks, watching his fingers closing around the
soft ovals as he returns to his brother's side. The small boy slips onto his
brother's knee to eat and, watching him there,
Yasia feels the emptiness of her own lap. Nothing but her own hands to rest
there - and even they have nothing to hold in them. That is such a powerful scene
that conveys the heightened appreciation, amid war time, of life's sweet
simplicities, things we normally take for granted: a warm haven, a shared meal, a
bite of food. It's a precious moment that illuminates
the frailty and innocence of children. It articulates Yasia's unmet desires and
how this war has prohibited her from assuming the identity she longs for of
wife and mother. And Seiffert's choice to use an egg - a symbol of life and, in
Jewish tradition, a symbol of a promise - is brilliant. The magnitude of that
moment is what I anticipated from this entire book. Unfortunately, it's the only
scene with such depth and gravity, a rare instance where this book's
potential shines through. One of my problems with this book is that I never
had a clear sense of time, because Seiffert is constantly bouncing to
different characters and pausing mid-thought to give backstory. The book
jacket makes a point of emphasizing that everything in this book transpires over
the course of three days, which is conceptually alarming given how many
lives are affected or ruined in such a short period of time. Without that clear
sense of time the severity of what happens is slightly diminished. I think this
is a symptom of Seiffert adding more characters during the writing process
and then struggling to juggle them in so few pages. Had Seiffert decided to focus on
one, possibly two characters, this would have been a more emotionally fraught,
memorable read. Ny vote is for Yankel and Yasia. With Yankle we see the war
through the eyes of a vulnerable Jewish boy. We experience hunger, fear,
uncertainty about family, and the responsibility of protecting a little
brother. His options are be captured by the Germans, hide and starve ,or take a
chance on a stranger, which could prove a fatal decision. With Yasia we see a
woman worried her lover will die in battle. We're privy to her dashed dreams
and her longing for motherhood. She's beautiful, and the German soldiers often
noticed that, so there's this lingering concern that she could be raped. Her
neighbors are aware of what's happening to the Jews, but they're not concerned
because they've adopted an attitude of, "Well, at least it's not happening to me,"
which brings to mind Martin Niemoller's poem. And her decision to interact with
two Jewish boys is exceedingly dangerous. I also took issue with how Seiffert
handles the mass graves. She mentions soldiers rounding up
hundreds of Jews and stripping them of their clothing. She writes of newly dug
soil and heaps of tangled limbs, but she never specifically states that German
soldiers lined up Jewish men, women, and children in front of gaping graves and
shot them. When the moment comes to fire the guns she breaks the scene. I spent a
fair amount of time wondering why. Why doesn't she finish that scene? I'm having
hard time talking about this.
Sometimes the unspoken is more powerful. Maybe by not stating what happened she's
implying that those acts were unspeakable. But I also wondered if she
simply shied away from the challenge of conveying the humiliation and horror of
those last moments. When future generations pick up this book, and World
War II is as distant as the Civil War or the War of Independence is to us, I think
people will be able to intuit what happened in that scene, but I don't think
it's weighty enough to adequately convey the humiliation and terror. My opinion of
this book is on par with another long list title: Home Fire by Kamilla Shamsee.
A Boy in Winter is not a bad book; it's not a great book, either. It strikes me as
an okay addition to this year's longlist. I wouldn't tell you not to read it, but I
definitely expected more from it. If you decide to give it a chance, expect a
quick read that flits around to myriad characters and touches on several
aspects of World War II but stubbornly refuses to dig deep. If you've already
read the book, what did you think of it? Tell me your thoughts and reactions in
the comments. Thanks, everybody!
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