My Rating: 4.8
Lale and Gita meet in Auschwitz. Lale is given the prestigious job of being the Tattooist of the numbers for all the new prisoners. This position gives him a small amount of freedom that he uses to get extra food and distributes to keep others alive. As Lale falls in love with Gita, he gives her hope to stay alive by picturing life together after they get out.
Knowing that this is a true story makes it all the more amazing. Like Viktor Frankl's book Man's Search for Meaning, Lale discovers that the key to life and survival is having hope and he spreads that hope throughout Auschwitz. As horrific as this was, it is also the story of overcoming incredible odds, survival and of love.
Lale and Gita meet in Auschwitz. Lale is given the prestigious job of being the Tattooist of the numbers for all the new prisoners. This position gives him a small amount of freedom that he uses to get extra food and distributes to keep others alive. As Lale falls in love with Gita, he gives her hope to stay alive by picturing life together after they get out.
1930s Budapest and starts out just as a young Hungarian Jew, Andras Lévi, departs for the École Spéciale d'Architecture in Paris. He hones his talent for design, works backstage in a theater, and allies with other Jewish students in defiance of rising Nazi influence. And then he meets Klara, a captivating Hungarian ballet instructor nine years his senior with a painful past and a willful teenage daughter.
A year in France brings a young American new reserves of sympathy and maturity in this poised, accomplished first novel. Nineteen-year-old Rosie, King's sensitive narrator, arrives in Paris on the first day of the school year, set for her job as the Tivot family's au pair. The other au pairs (in French usage, filles) are cosmopolitan students drawn to French culture. Rosie, however, has come here to flee her past: she became pregnant as a deliberate act of charity, giving up her baby so her infertile sister could have a child. But that decision has only heightened her omnipresent sense of loss. Her months with the Tivot family on their houseboat bring her new and difficult human connections: to the inquisitive, needy 12-year-old Lola and her younger brother, Guillaume; to their unhappy, astringent mother, Nicole; and to their father, Marc. This is a light easy read yet contains much more than meets the eye. Very enjoyable and well written. As one reviewer said, "it left us feeling as we've become fluent in a foreign language".
This is about the intersecting lives of the men and women who produce a newspaper—and one woman who reads it religiously, if belatedly. Although the chapters clearly intersect, it reads like a short story. In the opening chapter, aging, dissolute Paris correspondent Lloyd Burko pressures his estranged son to leak information from the French Foreign Ministry, and in the process unearths startling family fare that won't sell a single edition. Obit writer Arthur Gopal, whose overarching goal at the paper is indolence, encounters personal tragedy and, with it, unexpected career ambition. Late in the book, as the paper buckles, recently laid-off copyeditor Dave Belling seduces the CFO who fired him. Throughout, the founding publisher's progeny stagger under a heritage they don't understand. As the ragtag staff faces down the implications of the paper's tilt into oblivion, there are more than enough sublime moments, unexpected turns and sheer inky wretchedness to warrant putting this on the shelf next to other great newspaper novels. Despite my not enjoying short stories, I did find this book very engagine. If you enjoy short stories, you will love this book.
