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Far to Go
The Man Booker Prize finalist Far to Go by acclaimed author Alison Pick is historical fiction at its very best.
When Czechoslovakia relinquishes the Sudetenland to Hitler, the powerful influence of Nazi propaganda sweeps through towns and villages like a sinister vanguard of the Reich's advancing army. A fiercely patriotic secular Jew, Pavel Bauer is helpless to prevent his world from unraveling as first his government, then his business partners, then his neighbors turn their back on his affluent, once-beloved family. Only the Bauers' adoring governess, Marta, sticks by Pavel, his wife, Anneliese, and their little son, Pepik, bound by her deep affection for her employers and friends. But when Marta learns of their impending betrayal at the hands of her lover, Ernst, Pavel's best friend, she is paralyzed by her own fear of discovery—even as the endangered family for whom she cares so deeply struggles with the most difficult decision of their lives.
Interwoven with a present-day narrative that gradually reveals the fate of the Bauer family during and after the war, Far to Go is a riveting family epic, love story, and psychological drama.
When Czechoslovakia relinquishes the Sudetenland to Hitler, the powerful influence of Nazi propaganda sweeps through towns and villages like a sinister vanguard of the Reich's advancing army. A fiercely patriotic secular Jew, Pavel Bauer is helpless to prevent his world from unraveling as first his government, then his business partners, then his neighbors turn their back on his affluent, once-beloved family. Only the Bauers' adoring governess, Marta, sticks by Pavel, his wife, Anneliese, and their little son, Pepik, bound by her deep affection for her employers and friends. But when Marta learns of their impending betrayal at the hands of her lover, Ernst, Pavel's best friend, she is paralyzed by her own fear of discovery—even as the endangered family for whom she cares so deeply struggles with the most difficult decision of their lives.
Interwoven with a present-day narrative that gradually reveals the fate of the Bauer family during and after the war, Far to Go is a riveting family epic, love story, and psychological drama.
312 pages, Paperback
First published August 28, 2010
81 people are currently reading
6394 people want to read
About the author
Alison Pick
12 books84 followersALISON PICK'S best-selling novel FAR TO GO was nominated for the Man Booker Prize and won the Canadian Jewish Book Award. It was a Top 10 Book of 2010 at NOW magazine and the Toronto Star, and was published to international acclaim. Alison was the winner of the 2002 Bronwen Wallace Award for the most promising writer in Canada under 35. Currently on Faculty at the Humber School for Writers and the Banff Centre for the Arts, she lives and writes in Toronto.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 364 reviews
August 30, 2017
"There were families in England who gave up everything they had, and often what they did not have, to offer a tiny traveler some kind of home. There are stories of love and heartbreaking humanity– – but these are not the bulk of the stories."
"What I have found far more frequently are cases of trauma and upset. The Kindertransport children that were sent out of Czechoslovakia often spoke no English. They arrived in a country with no desire for war, battling tensions about its own role in the conflict brewing across the Channel. The children arrived in homes where money was scarce, to foster parents who had been shamed into taking them. At what we would now call a 'critical developmental stage', everything solid was pulled out from under them. Children do not forget that. It stays with them, a wall that goes up at the first hint of intimacy."
"We academics are told to frame the world in objective terms, but I am speaking now, as you've guessed, from my particular experience".
"There are things I remember about my mother.
.......growling of her stomach-- fingers combing gently through my hair.....
"I remember a dim light, late fall, ......she was looking back at me already then, as though across a great gulf of time. When I caught another glimpse, she had taken off her scarf. It was crumbled in a ball in her hand, which she held against her chest. A bit of wind played with her hair around her face. She held my gaze – – there was something she was telling me, something she needed me to know. The whole history of our family was contained in that look. She turned a corner and was gone".
.....Historical fiction
......Two narrators --The above quote is one of them - a scholar. We learn who she is at the end. I didn't even try to guess - I was just very moved when I found out.
I think I stopped breathing for a few seconds.
The other narrator is a governess named Marta who works in the home of wealthy Czech Jews: Pavel and Anneliese Bauer. She takes care of their young son, Pepik. I loved her - she was my favorite character- favorite 'adult' character -- how can you not love a child?/!!!
Besides the two storylines - inserted are written letters which kept me on my toes - I enjoyed reflecting with them - they added some mystery.
I couldn't pull myself away from this book. My phone was turned off – – my walking, exercise, house chores, and mail, would all have to wait. ( I was taking a needed rest break from pounding the pavement anyway).... and once again - I was reminded how MUCH A BOOK CAN COMFORT WHEN NEEDED! --escape to another place in time - concerns for another time in history.....
Tragedy- beyond tragedy-- and heart-wrenching choices --yet....extremely engaging --emotionally spent from 'falling-into-the-storytelling'.
Very well written. This was my first book by Alison Pick and won't be my last.
"What I have found far more frequently are cases of trauma and upset. The Kindertransport children that were sent out of Czechoslovakia often spoke no English. They arrived in a country with no desire for war, battling tensions about its own role in the conflict brewing across the Channel. The children arrived in homes where money was scarce, to foster parents who had been shamed into taking them. At what we would now call a 'critical developmental stage', everything solid was pulled out from under them. Children do not forget that. It stays with them, a wall that goes up at the first hint of intimacy."
"We academics are told to frame the world in objective terms, but I am speaking now, as you've guessed, from my particular experience".
"There are things I remember about my mother.
.......growling of her stomach-- fingers combing gently through my hair.....
"I remember a dim light, late fall, ......she was looking back at me already then, as though across a great gulf of time. When I caught another glimpse, she had taken off her scarf. It was crumbled in a ball in her hand, which she held against her chest. A bit of wind played with her hair around her face. She held my gaze – – there was something she was telling me, something she needed me to know. The whole history of our family was contained in that look. She turned a corner and was gone".
.....Historical fiction
......Two narrators --The above quote is one of them - a scholar. We learn who she is at the end. I didn't even try to guess - I was just very moved when I found out.
I think I stopped breathing for a few seconds.
The other narrator is a governess named Marta who works in the home of wealthy Czech Jews: Pavel and Anneliese Bauer. She takes care of their young son, Pepik. I loved her - she was my favorite character- favorite 'adult' character -- how can you not love a child?/!!!
Besides the two storylines - inserted are written letters which kept me on my toes - I enjoyed reflecting with them - they added some mystery.
I couldn't pull myself away from this book. My phone was turned off – – my walking, exercise, house chores, and mail, would all have to wait. ( I was taking a needed rest break from pounding the pavement anyway).... and once again - I was reminded how MUCH A BOOK CAN COMFORT WHEN NEEDED! --escape to another place in time - concerns for another time in history.....
Tragedy- beyond tragedy-- and heart-wrenching choices --yet....extremely engaging --emotionally spent from 'falling-into-the-storytelling'.
Very well written. This was my first book by Alison Pick and won't be my last.
November 11, 2018
4.5 " unbelievably sad and beautiful" stars !!
8th Favorite Read of 2015
Ms. Pick's book "Far to Go" was long listed for the 2011 booker prize and won the Canadian Jewish Book Prize for fiction that same year.
I don't have many words for this book as it completely overwhelmed me emotionally. I cried on the bus, at Starbucks and onto my partner's eggroll at Panda Hut (He said "Jaidee there is enough sodium in the eggroll- you don't have to add to it")
The book is gorgeously written with characters that leap off the page in their complexity and humanness. It takes place in 1939 in the Sudetenland in Czechoslovakia and is the slow demise of an affluent secular Jewish family as the Nazis slowly start to infiltrate the nation. The family story is beautifully rendered complete with a love triangle, lost siblings, stolen assets and a little boy named Pepik that plays the heartstrings like a harp. There is also a subplot that takes place in the current day and in the end partially answers some of the questions that are brought up in the main narrative.
This is a quiet domestic piece that must have played out thousands of times with variations in 1939. Alison Pick has written a novel that is extremely worthy of the prize she has won and this book will stay on my mind but more importantly in my heart for a very long time.
8th Favorite Read of 2015
Ms. Pick's book "Far to Go" was long listed for the 2011 booker prize and won the Canadian Jewish Book Prize for fiction that same year.
I don't have many words for this book as it completely overwhelmed me emotionally. I cried on the bus, at Starbucks and onto my partner's eggroll at Panda Hut (He said "Jaidee there is enough sodium in the eggroll- you don't have to add to it")
The book is gorgeously written with characters that leap off the page in their complexity and humanness. It takes place in 1939 in the Sudetenland in Czechoslovakia and is the slow demise of an affluent secular Jewish family as the Nazis slowly start to infiltrate the nation. The family story is beautifully rendered complete with a love triangle, lost siblings, stolen assets and a little boy named Pepik that plays the heartstrings like a harp. There is also a subplot that takes place in the current day and in the end partially answers some of the questions that are brought up in the main narrative.
This is a quiet domestic piece that must have played out thousands of times with variations in 1939. Alison Pick has written a novel that is extremely worthy of the prize she has won and this book will stay on my mind but more importantly in my heart for a very long time.
February 28, 2018
I was enjoying this until I realised the author was writing a different novel to the one I wanted to read, was following characters I wasn't interested in. There were clues early on that this was going to go off the rails when an overwrought narrator kept interrupting the wartime narrative to speak in the first person. However, these interludes were short so it was easy to ignore them and hope for the best. What interested me initially was she focused on two characters who were potentially dangerous to the Jewish family at the heart of this novel. Almost always in Holocaust novels the author concentrates on the good guys and makes little effort to depict the bad guys with any insight. They're just plain evil as if that's all we need to know. For a long stretch of this novel I thought the author was going to give us the bad guys. Marta is the housekeeper of a wealthy Jewish family in the Sudetenland. She's having an affair with the pernicious foreman of her employer's fabric factory. She's not a bad person but she's resentful, uneducated, emotionally unstable, easily influenced and clearly dangerous to the wellbeing of the Jewish family that employs her. Most of the considerable tension of the early part of the novel is provided by the volatile whims of these two characters. We're dealing with the banality of evil.
Then at a certain point a lot of melodramatic domestic stuff happens - the mother, who now takes over from Marta as the villain of the piece and is incoherent throughout the book, sleeps with a Nazi and Marta sleeps with her ward's father. The novel's focus undergoes a sea change. This becomes still more evident when the narrative abandons the family and instead follows the young son on his journey to England as part of the kindertransport programme. Here I utterly lost interest. The tone became sentimental, the artistry clumsy. There then follows a long section in the first person that reveals the entire wartime narrative is artifice. I'm afraid I didn't find this clever. I found it annoying. A very cheap trick. The novel became mainstream cinema - no matter how much bad stuff happens the end will make you feel a bit better about everything.
There's a scene early on in this book where a group of youths beat a Jewish tailor to death and I wondered why authors never try to get inside the heads of these characters. It's easy to imagine the good guys. Far more challenging would be to investigate the bad guys. The bad guy in this novel simply disappears when the plot no longer needs him. He's nothing but a convenient plot device to add tension.
Then at a certain point a lot of melodramatic domestic stuff happens - the mother, who now takes over from Marta as the villain of the piece and is incoherent throughout the book, sleeps with a Nazi and Marta sleeps with her ward's father. The novel's focus undergoes a sea change. This becomes still more evident when the narrative abandons the family and instead follows the young son on his journey to England as part of the kindertransport programme. Here I utterly lost interest. The tone became sentimental, the artistry clumsy. There then follows a long section in the first person that reveals the entire wartime narrative is artifice. I'm afraid I didn't find this clever. I found it annoying. A very cheap trick. The novel became mainstream cinema - no matter how much bad stuff happens the end will make you feel a bit better about everything.
There's a scene early on in this book where a group of youths beat a Jewish tailor to death and I wondered why authors never try to get inside the heads of these characters. It's easy to imagine the good guys. Far more challenging would be to investigate the bad guys. The bad guy in this novel simply disappears when the plot no longer needs him. He's nothing but a convenient plot device to add tension.
May 30, 2018
Hartverscheurend...heftig...ontroerend...De kindertransporten vanuit Tsjechië naar Engeland. In uiterste wanhoop brachten ouders het grootste offer dat denkbaar is...hun kinderen te laten gaan...hun kinderen alleen af te laten reizen naar Engeland zodat ze veilig zouden zijn...De voelbare angst van de ouders is blijvend overgedragen op deze kinderen...zij hebben de oorlog overleefd...blijvend getekend...
Er wordt een treffend tijdsbeeld geschetst van een fabrikanten gezin met personeel in Sudeten/Praag en de keuzes waar ze voor komen te staan als Hitler aan de macht komt. Dit alles vanuit overgeleverde brieven en documenten gereconstrueerd.
Er wordt een treffend tijdsbeeld geschetst van een fabrikanten gezin met personeel in Sudeten/Praag en de keuzes waar ze voor komen te staan als Hitler aan de macht komt. Dit alles vanuit overgeleverde brieven en documenten gereconstrueerd.
May 8, 2011
Imagine if a war is brewing around you, but you don't have the knowledge of WW2, its history, causes, and its ultimate two tragedies (the Holocaust and the atom bombings) and their repercussions. Imagine that you are not lucky enough to have read about what Hitler did, from your living room or classroom, and rail against his actions in indignation, disgust and disbelief. Imagine that WW2 never happened - instead it is only going to happen, soon, in exactly the same way and we are going to be puppets in Hitler's hands, again. As a member of a designated "inferior" race, would you trust the people who stood by you all these years - friends, neighbors, colleagues? As a non-member of the said "inferior" race, would you betray your friends, neighbors, colleagues, and even little kids, all because a self-styled leader is brandishing a supremacy theory? This is what Alison Pick's Far to Go asks the reader. Not what choices you would make now, but what you would have done then. It puts you in the shoes of the people who had no idea about what is unfolding about them, what is going to happen.
Far to Go follows two story lines - one is set during the year leading to the start of WW2 and the other is set in the present. The events of the past are narrated mostly from the perspective of Marta, a non-Jewish nanny staying with a Jewish family - Pavel and Anneliese Bauer and their son Pipik. The present is written in second-person narrative with the identity of the characters not revealed until the last few chapters. The Bauers are an affluent and secular Czech family, who have not practiced their religion in years. At the time of the events in the book, however, in 1938-39, having a Jewish grandparent was enough to make a person Jewish in the eyes of the SS officers.
At the beginning of the book, Pavel is telling Marta about an anti-Semitic attack that his brother faced. Marta is very confused by all the anti-Jewish sentiments floating around her. She likes and respects the Bauers, and looks after Pepik as if he was her own son. But when Ernst, Pavel's colleague, whom Marta meets secretly at night, talks about the inferiority of the Jewish people, she is truly unsure of what to believe. On the one hand, she can't fathom how such a thing could be true. Aren't they just like her? On the other hand, she wants to believe Ernst, wants to impress him. And thinks there there possibly is some difference between the Jews and her.
I've wondered many times how people could just accept Hilter's dogma, when so many people were being killed, many disappearing into camps. I knew the facts - how easy it is to be swayed, how many young people wanted to "belong" and be seen doing something important, how they wanted to get over the WW1 failure. But it is one thing reading about it and a totally different thing actually feeling it or living it. I thought that Far to Go helped me answer those questions in the best way - by putting me in the shoes of Marta. She is no perfect person, just like many others during that period. She has considered Hilter's theories, committed a truly life-changing act towards the Bauers as an act of defiance, and not tried to rescue the Bauers' from a swindler. I so wanted her to stand up and tell the truth. In the end, I could understand why she did what she did. It was not right, but it was the only way she would have done it.
Far to Go also explores the Jewish identity, or rather the meaning of being one. Not in the religious or theoretical sense, but more in the sense of the believers' actions. The Bauers were assimilated Jews - they were as non-Jewish as could be. They didn't follow the Jewish customs, they celebrated Christmas. And yet, the arrival of Hitler triggers something in them. Pavel becomes increasingly proud of his Jewish heritage and opposes his wife's desire to baptize Pepik. Anneliese, on the other hand, distances herself further from the faith. It becomes evident soon that they had never had a conversation about their religion.
Rather than being just another WW2 fiction, Far to Go is actually about the Kindertransport, a program by which nearly 10,000 children were sent without their parents out of Nazi-occupied areas. Pepik too is put on the train, but the process by which the Bauers managed to get Pepik on was not straightforward. They suffered a lot, and struggled with the many choices they and Marta made. The events of this book have relation to the author's background - Alison Pick's own Jewish grandparents left Czechoslovakia to Canada without telling their children that they were Jewish. The dedication section of the book has a list of 12 people, 8 of whom died between 1942 and 1944. No guessing was needed to know how or why most, if not all, must have died. Even though it's no secret that millions lost their lives during WW2, seeing so many members of the same family on the same page is painful. Two of them were not even past 10 years of age.
When the book started off in the present in the second-person narrative, I was worried. I'm not a fan of that form of narration, but surprisingly, I thought it worked well here. I myself write in second-person sometimes when I write my reviews, if I want to project my experience on to the reader, so that you can be the one experiencing instead of me. In that same respect, I thought it worked really well here, because obviously I didn't put the book down. The narration is occasionally interrupted by a few letters - many of them truly heart-breaking.
Alison Pick's writing pulled me in the right from the start. There is a frank bluntness about her prose that makes you want to keep turning the page. She examines emotions in a very unflinching manner; there are no perfect characters here, everyone is flawed. Even though Pavel is mostly a good person, Pipik an innocent child, and Marta a poor girl who just knows what she hears, it is Anneliese who I most sympathized with. She could be selfish, appear uncaring, show disregard towards the help, but she was willing to do anything, even lose her honor, to save her family. It was sad. Overall, I strongly recommend this book. It is beautiful, poignant and very powerful!
Far to Go follows two story lines - one is set during the year leading to the start of WW2 and the other is set in the present. The events of the past are narrated mostly from the perspective of Marta, a non-Jewish nanny staying with a Jewish family - Pavel and Anneliese Bauer and their son Pipik. The present is written in second-person narrative with the identity of the characters not revealed until the last few chapters. The Bauers are an affluent and secular Czech family, who have not practiced their religion in years. At the time of the events in the book, however, in 1938-39, having a Jewish grandparent was enough to make a person Jewish in the eyes of the SS officers.
At the beginning of the book, Pavel is telling Marta about an anti-Semitic attack that his brother faced. Marta is very confused by all the anti-Jewish sentiments floating around her. She likes and respects the Bauers, and looks after Pepik as if he was her own son. But when Ernst, Pavel's colleague, whom Marta meets secretly at night, talks about the inferiority of the Jewish people, she is truly unsure of what to believe. On the one hand, she can't fathom how such a thing could be true. Aren't they just like her? On the other hand, she wants to believe Ernst, wants to impress him. And thinks there there possibly is some difference between the Jews and her.
I've wondered many times how people could just accept Hilter's dogma, when so many people were being killed, many disappearing into camps. I knew the facts - how easy it is to be swayed, how many young people wanted to "belong" and be seen doing something important, how they wanted to get over the WW1 failure. But it is one thing reading about it and a totally different thing actually feeling it or living it. I thought that Far to Go helped me answer those questions in the best way - by putting me in the shoes of Marta. She is no perfect person, just like many others during that period. She has considered Hilter's theories, committed a truly life-changing act towards the Bauers as an act of defiance, and not tried to rescue the Bauers' from a swindler. I so wanted her to stand up and tell the truth. In the end, I could understand why she did what she did. It was not right, but it was the only way she would have done it.
Far to Go also explores the Jewish identity, or rather the meaning of being one. Not in the religious or theoretical sense, but more in the sense of the believers' actions. The Bauers were assimilated Jews - they were as non-Jewish as could be. They didn't follow the Jewish customs, they celebrated Christmas. And yet, the arrival of Hitler triggers something in them. Pavel becomes increasingly proud of his Jewish heritage and opposes his wife's desire to baptize Pepik. Anneliese, on the other hand, distances herself further from the faith. It becomes evident soon that they had never had a conversation about their religion.
Rather than being just another WW2 fiction, Far to Go is actually about the Kindertransport, a program by which nearly 10,000 children were sent without their parents out of Nazi-occupied areas. Pepik too is put on the train, but the process by which the Bauers managed to get Pepik on was not straightforward. They suffered a lot, and struggled with the many choices they and Marta made. The events of this book have relation to the author's background - Alison Pick's own Jewish grandparents left Czechoslovakia to Canada without telling their children that they were Jewish. The dedication section of the book has a list of 12 people, 8 of whom died between 1942 and 1944. No guessing was needed to know how or why most, if not all, must have died. Even though it's no secret that millions lost their lives during WW2, seeing so many members of the same family on the same page is painful. Two of them were not even past 10 years of age.
When the book started off in the present in the second-person narrative, I was worried. I'm not a fan of that form of narration, but surprisingly, I thought it worked well here. I myself write in second-person sometimes when I write my reviews, if I want to project my experience on to the reader, so that you can be the one experiencing instead of me. In that same respect, I thought it worked really well here, because obviously I didn't put the book down. The narration is occasionally interrupted by a few letters - many of them truly heart-breaking.
Alison Pick's writing pulled me in the right from the start. There is a frank bluntness about her prose that makes you want to keep turning the page. She examines emotions in a very unflinching manner; there are no perfect characters here, everyone is flawed. Even though Pavel is mostly a good person, Pipik an innocent child, and Marta a poor girl who just knows what she hears, it is Anneliese who I most sympathized with. She could be selfish, appear uncaring, show disregard towards the help, but she was willing to do anything, even lose her honor, to save her family. It was sad. Overall, I strongly recommend this book. It is beautiful, poignant and very powerful!
August 8, 2011
DEFINITELY NO SPOILERS!!!
This has been difficult to achieve.
ETA: I admit defeat. I only want to give this book three stars, and I do not quite now why. The book was perfectly executed. It kept me reading. The characters were well rounded. The writing was fine. Some nice similes were included, but they were not excessive! But somerthing didn't work for me. It felt like fiction. The book was just plain kind of ordinary........ Sorry for being so unclear! I simply cannot give this and On Hitler's Mountain: Overcoming the Legacy of a Nazi Childhood the same number of stars. I cannot do it.
Maybe the lack of clarity added to arouse our curiosity annoyed me a teeny bit. Maybe I wanted it spelled out more clearly exactly who were the author's grandparents. I THINK I know, but I cannot say without giving a spoiler. I am not sure. The author wanted to write a book of fiction, and that is what she did. I think I would have preferred that she wrote it as a memoir and clarified which facts were missing. The author doesn't fill the reader in on some later personal events b/c she wishes to respect the privacy of certain individuals. But now I am confronted with the whole idea that this could be all wrong, just total fiction, a nice story that we put in place of the missing facts. Hmmm, I don't like that. Is this what is bothering me?! I am not sure. Sometimes we cannot know the past, no matter how much we want to understand it. Rather than making up stories, isn't it better to accept that we cannot know?
My husband is laughing at me as he goes out the door to work. He asked me what I was typing. He knows this has been bothering me since I finished the book yesterday. I didn't want to give this four stars, and I didn't know why. All I know is that I feel relieved having changed it to three stars. Perhaps I have resolved what was bothering me!
*************************************************
*************************************************
Really this book is a perfect example of what historical fiction can achieve. The novel is based on what is known about the author's grandparents. What is known are the dates of birth, dates and places of death. It is a known fact that one son of the Bauer family escaped death in an extermination camp through Kindertransport from Czechoslovakia to Britain. What is known is who are are the surviving offspring. What is not known are the emotions of these characters. What were the driving forces behind their choices. We will never really know for sure, but the author has made these people so real and so believable that what happens here in these pages does seem true. I appreciate that the author clearly states what she has guessed, what is fabulated. She in fact points out ohter possible scenarios. She has chosen one explanation for the given family tree. She has taken one possibility and brought it to life. The people live and breathe.
The story is about a mother, father, their son and a nanny. They live in Sudetenland, Czechoslovakia, when it is overtaken by the Nazis. They flee to Prague, before it too was invaded. It is also clearly stated in the book description that the son will be one of those children of Jewish heritage that were transported to safety by means of the Kindertransport. What this book does so wonderfully is show how different characters behaved in very different ways to the same given circulmstances. I was amazed at how well the author could portray people of different sensibilitues equally well. On Kristallnacht the adults are shocked by what they see, but even a child who has not seen the actual event feels the atmosphere in the house. The story shows you haow each character responds to the same event.
The following night at supper, nobody spoke. Pepik (the son) was free to mass his knedliky into mountain ranges as he desired. He seemed to think he had done something to provoke the silence at the table and began guessing what he was suppose to apologise for, "I'm sorry for playing with my food like a baby."
The Bauers kept eating.
"I'm sorry I wet my bed last night."
Anneliese looked at Marta with raised eyebrows, and Marta nodded to show this was true. (page 111)
Another point that should be mentioned is that the novel switched time period and narrative form at given intervals. All of a sudden you get someone speaking in the first person and at a later point in time. I was confused by this. I didn't know who was speaking, but rather than annoying me it aroused my curiosity. By the end of the novel you understand. I felt that this served a definite purpose. Just as some children of the Kindertransport must learn to live not knowing of their past, we the reader must learn to accept that we must wait to understand. Both we and the child want to understand the whole story. This was not merely a gimmick but in fact an important message.
Read this book to learn about the Kindertransport, to learn about what happened in Sudetenland and how secular Jews felt and reacted when they were confronted with hatred. The beauty of this book is that we people all behave so differently and you glimpse how this can be. I am giving this book four stars because the people felt all very different and yet all very real. I cannot give it five, because in a real memoir you get added little details that are lacking here. (Please see the afjustment above!)
This has been difficult to achieve.
ETA: I admit defeat. I only want to give this book three stars, and I do not quite now why. The book was perfectly executed. It kept me reading. The characters were well rounded. The writing was fine. Some nice similes were included, but they were not excessive! But somerthing didn't work for me. It felt like fiction. The book was just plain kind of ordinary........ Sorry for being so unclear! I simply cannot give this and On Hitler's Mountain: Overcoming the Legacy of a Nazi Childhood the same number of stars. I cannot do it.
Maybe the lack of clarity added to arouse our curiosity annoyed me a teeny bit. Maybe I wanted it spelled out more clearly exactly who were the author's grandparents. I THINK I know, but I cannot say without giving a spoiler. I am not sure. The author wanted to write a book of fiction, and that is what she did. I think I would have preferred that she wrote it as a memoir and clarified which facts were missing. The author doesn't fill the reader in on some later personal events b/c she wishes to respect the privacy of certain individuals. But now I am confronted with the whole idea that this could be all wrong, just total fiction, a nice story that we put in place of the missing facts. Hmmm, I don't like that. Is this what is bothering me?! I am not sure. Sometimes we cannot know the past, no matter how much we want to understand it. Rather than making up stories, isn't it better to accept that we cannot know?
My husband is laughing at me as he goes out the door to work. He asked me what I was typing. He knows this has been bothering me since I finished the book yesterday. I didn't want to give this four stars, and I didn't know why. All I know is that I feel relieved having changed it to three stars. Perhaps I have resolved what was bothering me!
*************************************************
*************************************************
Really this book is a perfect example of what historical fiction can achieve. The novel is based on what is known about the author's grandparents. What is known are the dates of birth, dates and places of death. It is a known fact that one son of the Bauer family escaped death in an extermination camp through Kindertransport from Czechoslovakia to Britain. What is known is who are are the surviving offspring. What is not known are the emotions of these characters. What were the driving forces behind their choices. We will never really know for sure, but the author has made these people so real and so believable that what happens here in these pages does seem true. I appreciate that the author clearly states what she has guessed, what is fabulated. She in fact points out ohter possible scenarios. She has chosen one explanation for the given family tree. She has taken one possibility and brought it to life. The people live and breathe.
The story is about a mother, father, their son and a nanny. They live in Sudetenland, Czechoslovakia, when it is overtaken by the Nazis. They flee to Prague, before it too was invaded. It is also clearly stated in the book description that the son will be one of those children of Jewish heritage that were transported to safety by means of the Kindertransport. What this book does so wonderfully is show how different characters behaved in very different ways to the same given circulmstances. I was amazed at how well the author could portray people of different sensibilitues equally well. On Kristallnacht the adults are shocked by what they see, but even a child who has not seen the actual event feels the atmosphere in the house. The story shows you haow each character responds to the same event.
The following night at supper, nobody spoke. Pepik (the son) was free to mass his knedliky into mountain ranges as he desired. He seemed to think he had done something to provoke the silence at the table and began guessing what he was suppose to apologise for, "I'm sorry for playing with my food like a baby."
The Bauers kept eating.
"I'm sorry I wet my bed last night."
Anneliese looked at Marta with raised eyebrows, and Marta nodded to show this was true. (page 111)
Another point that should be mentioned is that the novel switched time period and narrative form at given intervals. All of a sudden you get someone speaking in the first person and at a later point in time. I was confused by this. I didn't know who was speaking, but rather than annoying me it aroused my curiosity. By the end of the novel you understand. I felt that this served a definite purpose. Just as some children of the Kindertransport must learn to live not knowing of their past, we the reader must learn to accept that we must wait to understand. Both we and the child want to understand the whole story. This was not merely a gimmick but in fact an important message.
Read this book to learn about the Kindertransport, to learn about what happened in Sudetenland and how secular Jews felt and reacted when they were confronted with hatred. The beauty of this book is that we people all behave so differently and you glimpse how this can be. I am giving this book four stars because the people felt all very different and yet all very real. I cannot give it five, because in a real memoir you get added little details that are lacking here. (Please see the afjustment above!)
August 1, 2018
Very touching and well-executed book. Recommended.
August 5, 2011
Once in a while a book comes along that unexpectidly blows you away. This is that book.
Far to Go is set in Czechoslovaki in 1938, just before the outbreak of WW2. Pavel and Anneliese Bauer live with their 5 year old son, Pepik, in a suburban appartment in the northern region of Sudetenland. They own a factory, they have money, enjoy nights in at the theatre and employ a live-in nanny, Marta, to look after their son. They have a life – a good one – that is until the Nazi occupation and annexation of their homeland.
What I found really worked with this book is that we were shown an ordinary family - secular Jews in fact – which I believe added to the confusion of why they were being persecuted; they were just like their friends, their neighbours, their colleagues; they celebrated Christmas, they didn’t follow the customs of the Jewish faith. The fact that they were secular Jews also allowed the author (and reader) to try to understand and question how the war would impact their lives – while Anneliese was eager to shed thier history, Pavel found himself becoming increasingly fervent and proud of his heritige. Another person struggling with her own questions and feelings was Marta the nanny who, despite not being Jewish herself, had to listen to gossip and speculation about the family she lived with and loved and even horrified herself by randomly thinking comments like “dirty Jew” in her head. Marta is really the central character in Far To Go and her actions and decisions have repercussions on the Bauer family that she would have never seen coming; but again we are left to question – what would we have done?
Far To Go deals with a period of history that I was not so familiar with: Czechoslovakia before the war. The characters we are walking hand in hand with through the pages have no idea what is coming: they’ve never had cause to distrust or suspect their best friends before, they don’t understand why they have to give up their businesses and livelihoods, they don’t see why they should have to leave their homes and they certainly have never heard of death camps before. This is all to come; this is the future and they are living in ignorance of what awaits them.
Once Pavel and Anneliese have relented and moved to Prague (while they still can) they become increasingly aware that they have to send Pepik away on the Kindertransport to a family in the UK to look after him “just for a few weeks or months”. The scenes on the platform are heartbreaking. The gentleness of the narritive and the lack of melodrama in Far To Go doesn’t mean that these aren’t some of the most emotionally powerful pages I have ever read. I don’t have children and yet to put myself squarely in the book with those parents at that moment just about broke my heart; it’s almost beyond comprehension. I could see their little faces at the window, alone and not understanding why they were being sent away.
There is no room for flowery prose in this book; it’s sparse and no words are wasted. The empathy I felt for each person in this book, however, was so palpable I could almost taste it – it’s a gifted writer who can make a reader feel as they do here without relying on sensationalism and melodrama. You will question every one of the characters actions; you will ache for them, you will hope for them knowing that there is no hope, you will close the book and know that they were just a few people out of 6 million. Six million!
Verdict: Wow. Just wow. Highly, highly recommended.
Far to Go is set in Czechoslovaki in 1938, just before the outbreak of WW2. Pavel and Anneliese Bauer live with their 5 year old son, Pepik, in a suburban appartment in the northern region of Sudetenland. They own a factory, they have money, enjoy nights in at the theatre and employ a live-in nanny, Marta, to look after their son. They have a life – a good one – that is until the Nazi occupation and annexation of their homeland.
What I found really worked with this book is that we were shown an ordinary family - secular Jews in fact – which I believe added to the confusion of why they were being persecuted; they were just like their friends, their neighbours, their colleagues; they celebrated Christmas, they didn’t follow the customs of the Jewish faith. The fact that they were secular Jews also allowed the author (and reader) to try to understand and question how the war would impact their lives – while Anneliese was eager to shed thier history, Pavel found himself becoming increasingly fervent and proud of his heritige. Another person struggling with her own questions and feelings was Marta the nanny who, despite not being Jewish herself, had to listen to gossip and speculation about the family she lived with and loved and even horrified herself by randomly thinking comments like “dirty Jew” in her head. Marta is really the central character in Far To Go and her actions and decisions have repercussions on the Bauer family that she would have never seen coming; but again we are left to question – what would we have done?
Far To Go deals with a period of history that I was not so familiar with: Czechoslovakia before the war. The characters we are walking hand in hand with through the pages have no idea what is coming: they’ve never had cause to distrust or suspect their best friends before, they don’t understand why they have to give up their businesses and livelihoods, they don’t see why they should have to leave their homes and they certainly have never heard of death camps before. This is all to come; this is the future and they are living in ignorance of what awaits them.
Once Pavel and Anneliese have relented and moved to Prague (while they still can) they become increasingly aware that they have to send Pepik away on the Kindertransport to a family in the UK to look after him “just for a few weeks or months”. The scenes on the platform are heartbreaking. The gentleness of the narritive and the lack of melodrama in Far To Go doesn’t mean that these aren’t some of the most emotionally powerful pages I have ever read. I don’t have children and yet to put myself squarely in the book with those parents at that moment just about broke my heart; it’s almost beyond comprehension. I could see their little faces at the window, alone and not understanding why they were being sent away.
There is no room for flowery prose in this book; it’s sparse and no words are wasted. The empathy I felt for each person in this book, however, was so palpable I could almost taste it – it’s a gifted writer who can make a reader feel as they do here without relying on sensationalism and melodrama. You will question every one of the characters actions; you will ache for them, you will hope for them knowing that there is no hope, you will close the book and know that they were just a few people out of 6 million. Six million!
Verdict: Wow. Just wow. Highly, highly recommended.
February 27, 2018
Very competently put together -- but lacked the emotional power of the Invisible Bridge, another recent book that similarly drew on family history to illuminate a particular corner of the Holocaust and to tell a sweeping family story that was not about the camps but about the lived experience, before the camps, in a specific country (there Hungary, here Czechoslovakia). While the story has some wrenching twists and turns, there is a little too much telling of history (characters neatly recount historical events or listen to the radio), narrative distance (the fiction within a fiction), and overt contemplation of themes (why did some people leave and others stay?) that dilutes the impact. And the ending and its reveal seems rushed and forced...a lot of build up that does not quite resolve, an imbalance between the first 4/5ths of the book, where dread is slowly built, and the final section where all the most dramatic (and horrible) action happens offscreen. It was interesting to learn that the author was a poet -- because the more poetic and abstract me/you present day interludes were far more gripping than the historical narrative which always seems a bit staged and never quite sucked you in.
September 3, 2011
I read this because it was on the long list for the Man Booker Prize in 2011. If I was voting, I'd pick this as one of the books for the short list. It tells a compelling story of secular Jews in Czechoslovakia, from the perspective of their "gentile" nanny, Marta. It covers Hitler's invasion of Czechoslovakia, the kindertransport, and focuses on themes of religious identity and betrayal.
Interspersed are brief chapters from the perspective of a retired academic who is doing interviews with grown-up children who took the kindertransport. Quite a bit of this is loosely based off information the author came across in researching her own family history, and of stories told to her. I feel like this is a part of the WWII and Holocaust story we are not as familiar with, and the characters here are much less cold than those in The Glass Room, which was shortlisted for the Booker in 2009.
Interspersed are brief chapters from the perspective of a retired academic who is doing interviews with grown-up children who took the kindertransport. Quite a bit of this is loosely based off information the author came across in researching her own family history, and of stories told to her. I feel like this is a part of the WWII and Holocaust story we are not as familiar with, and the characters here are much less cold than those in The Glass Room, which was shortlisted for the Booker in 2009.
May 13, 2019
Far to Go
"Time is a snowglobe; you shake it and everything changes."
An emotional story set during WW2. This is a story that grabs your heart; Families separating because of the war. Parents who see only one way out, a last resort for their most precious possession. Their children. They send their children to England to secure their future and save them the war.
A truely heartbreaking warstory.
"Time is a snowglobe; you shake it and everything changes."
An emotional story set during WW2. This is a story that grabs your heart; Families separating because of the war. Parents who see only one way out, a last resort for their most precious possession. Their children. They send their children to England to secure their future and save them the war.
A truely heartbreaking warstory.
August 2, 2018
Well-written book that gave me an insight into a slice of history I previously knew nothing about. The characters are well-fleshed out and the little boy was so endearing. Here and there clichés arose, for example, I didn't like the negative way in which Mrs. Bauer was portrayed, as the wife of the main character's love interest, she is made out to be too much of a baddie. Also the structure, with chapters in the first person, made by an unknown narrator, that intersparse the book, take away from the power of the main story.
Still, a book well worth reading.
Still, a book well worth reading.
July 28, 2011
Czechoslovakia. 1938. War is coming, and invasion by Germany seems inevitable.
Pavel and Anneliese Bauer think that they will be safe. That their young son, Pepik, will be safe. They are affluent, successful, good people.
Yes, they are Jews, but they are secular Jews, not practicing the faith.
But of course they won’t be safe. And they will have to make painful decisions about what to do, about how best to protect their son.
Alison Pick tells their story simply and clearly. She picks out details beautifully. Day to day details of an ordinary family that has to carry on, through a terrible period in their country’s history.
Telling her story in the third person, through the eyes of Marta, Pepik’s gentile nanny was, I think, a wise decision. It pulled me away from the story just a little, and allowed me to see it more clearly.
And it was the most effective way to show so many different emotions and reactions.
At first Pavel wanted to stand his ground, acknowledge his Jewish heritage, believing that right will prevail. Anneliese was more pragmatic, eager to cast off her Jewishness and escape. And Marta worried about her young charge, and about her own future. And she made some bad decisions.
They all made bad decisions. Bcause they were in an impossible, unprecedented situation. Because they had no idea what their futures might hold.
Their characters were so well drawn. They were utterly believable, complex, fallible human beings.
My heart nearly broke when Pepik was sent away to safety on the Kindertransport. I understood why, but he didn’t understand, he didn’t want to go and, like so many other children, he had to be torn away.
The whole story was painful to watch, because the situation was so impossible. And yet the pages turned quickly. Because, though I feared the worst, I had to know.
There was just one weak link: the contemporary framing story. It lacked the clarity of the main narrative, the different styles felt mismatched, and I really wasn’t sure what was going on.
In the end though it made sense, and I understood what the author was doing.
A flaw, but not a fatal flaw.
Far to Go is a moving, human story. A different view of a period that has been written about so much.
Alison Pick has built well on both her own family history and her research.
Pavel and Anneliese Bauer think that they will be safe. That their young son, Pepik, will be safe. They are affluent, successful, good people.
Yes, they are Jews, but they are secular Jews, not practicing the faith.
But of course they won’t be safe. And they will have to make painful decisions about what to do, about how best to protect their son.
Alison Pick tells their story simply and clearly. She picks out details beautifully. Day to day details of an ordinary family that has to carry on, through a terrible period in their country’s history.
Telling her story in the third person, through the eyes of Marta, Pepik’s gentile nanny was, I think, a wise decision. It pulled me away from the story just a little, and allowed me to see it more clearly.
And it was the most effective way to show so many different emotions and reactions.
At first Pavel wanted to stand his ground, acknowledge his Jewish heritage, believing that right will prevail. Anneliese was more pragmatic, eager to cast off her Jewishness and escape. And Marta worried about her young charge, and about her own future. And she made some bad decisions.
They all made bad decisions. Bcause they were in an impossible, unprecedented situation. Because they had no idea what their futures might hold.
Their characters were so well drawn. They were utterly believable, complex, fallible human beings.
My heart nearly broke when Pepik was sent away to safety on the Kindertransport. I understood why, but he didn’t understand, he didn’t want to go and, like so many other children, he had to be torn away.
The whole story was painful to watch, because the situation was so impossible. And yet the pages turned quickly. Because, though I feared the worst, I had to know.
There was just one weak link: the contemporary framing story. It lacked the clarity of the main narrative, the different styles felt mismatched, and I really wasn’t sure what was going on.
In the end though it made sense, and I understood what the author was doing.
A flaw, but not a fatal flaw.
Far to Go is a moving, human story. A different view of a period that has been written about so much.
Alison Pick has built well on both her own family history and her research.
March 14, 2011
The inspiration behind Far to Go is Alison Pick’s own family history. Her grandparents were forced to flee from persecution in Czechoslovakia during the Second World War, eventually settling in Canada. She uses this to create the story of the Bauer family, a priviledged Czech family who are Jewish by birth but don’t really practise their faith. However, Pavel, Anneliese and their young son Pepik are Jewish enough to become targets as the Nazi occupations spreads across Europe. The family must try to work out how best to escape and Marta, their non-Jewish nanny, must decide exactly where her loyalties lie.
The Second World War is a subject which is eternally popular (if that’s the right word) in historical fiction and there are a whole host of memoirs and autobiographies from that time, so a book has to try rather hard to stand out amongst so many voices. Far to Go succeeds because it has a different situation and a different tone to other books that I’ve read in a similar vein. Where other novels of the Holocaust can be beautifully, elegiacally tragic, bleakly depressing or even ultimately hopeful, Far to Go feels unusually dirty and distasteful in a way which is extremely effective. This is not a straightforward book but one filled with complex emotions: it is about betrayal which is ultimately understandable, divided loyalties with no possible solution, the physical ache of regret, and bitterness rather than tragedy. The atmosphere is particularly well created.
The novel also deals with an aspect of the Holocaust which I’ve not really read about before, most of the books I’ve read being set in Germany. Pick illustrates well how different the situation was in Czechoslovakia, showing the conflict between Germans and Czechs as a more complex level underlying the usual Nazi/Jew dichotomy. She also chooses to make her characters a family of secular Jews, and in doing so she is able to explore such a variety of different reactions to the persecutions: Pavel becomes more Jewish, driven to explore the faith which makes him an outcast; Anneliese is desperate to throw off the stigma of Jewishness and escape, and Marta the gentile nanny is forced to see her employers in a totally new light. Marta’s struggle to decide what to do in her situation comes across as very real and human, and I like the fact that she is neither a saint with no thoughts for her own security nor a selfishly motivated traitor. I’m sure there were many people who felt exactly as Marta did and were just as confused about their sudden change in status, so it feels very believable.
For all its interesting new perspective, this book is not without its flaws. The four different strands of narrative in quick succession which open the book (a letter from one character, a letter which it’s only later possible to tell is from a different character, a brief first person section with an unidentified ‘I’ and ‘you’, and the main body of the story in third person with different characters again) are initially very confusing. It’s impossible to tell if these people are all the same, partially the same or all different and there’s no obvious features to link the four sections together. It is only as the reader progresses through the book that it becomes apparent who is being referred to in each of them, and while this technique can be effective, I found it to be a few too many things at once with which to open a novel. This mixed structure continues throughout, and while the inclusion of the letters is particularly poignant, I found that it held me at arms’ length from the characters and their actions. I watched them experience these powerful emotions and although the overall emotional tone of the book was impressively well drawn, as I’ve already stated, I didn’t find myself feeling along with them but observing from a distance.
The other niggle that I had was the use of Czech words and phrases. The way that they’re sprinkled throughout the text is actually a rather nice touch as it grounds the novel very firmly in one specific place and adds an authentic flavour of Czechoslovakia. However, the terms used are rarely explained within the context of the story, and having no experience at all of Czech language, Czech food or Czech cutlure I had no idea what all these things being talked about were. I know that lengthy explanations can sometimes be tedious and laboured to read and if they are words that Pick is used to using because of her Czech heritage then it may just not have come up as an issue, but at least the first time a Czech term occurs it would be nice if there were some sort of explanation of what it means without me having to resort to constant Googling. The simple expedient of adding a glossary to the end of the book would solve this problem wonderfully.
The Second World War is a subject which is eternally popular (if that’s the right word) in historical fiction and there are a whole host of memoirs and autobiographies from that time, so a book has to try rather hard to stand out amongst so many voices. Far to Go succeeds because it has a different situation and a different tone to other books that I’ve read in a similar vein. Where other novels of the Holocaust can be beautifully, elegiacally tragic, bleakly depressing or even ultimately hopeful, Far to Go feels unusually dirty and distasteful in a way which is extremely effective. This is not a straightforward book but one filled with complex emotions: it is about betrayal which is ultimately understandable, divided loyalties with no possible solution, the physical ache of regret, and bitterness rather than tragedy. The atmosphere is particularly well created.
The novel also deals with an aspect of the Holocaust which I’ve not really read about before, most of the books I’ve read being set in Germany. Pick illustrates well how different the situation was in Czechoslovakia, showing the conflict between Germans and Czechs as a more complex level underlying the usual Nazi/Jew dichotomy. She also chooses to make her characters a family of secular Jews, and in doing so she is able to explore such a variety of different reactions to the persecutions: Pavel becomes more Jewish, driven to explore the faith which makes him an outcast; Anneliese is desperate to throw off the stigma of Jewishness and escape, and Marta the gentile nanny is forced to see her employers in a totally new light. Marta’s struggle to decide what to do in her situation comes across as very real and human, and I like the fact that she is neither a saint with no thoughts for her own security nor a selfishly motivated traitor. I’m sure there were many people who felt exactly as Marta did and were just as confused about their sudden change in status, so it feels very believable.
For all its interesting new perspective, this book is not without its flaws. The four different strands of narrative in quick succession which open the book (a letter from one character, a letter which it’s only later possible to tell is from a different character, a brief first person section with an unidentified ‘I’ and ‘you’, and the main body of the story in third person with different characters again) are initially very confusing. It’s impossible to tell if these people are all the same, partially the same or all different and there’s no obvious features to link the four sections together. It is only as the reader progresses through the book that it becomes apparent who is being referred to in each of them, and while this technique can be effective, I found it to be a few too many things at once with which to open a novel. This mixed structure continues throughout, and while the inclusion of the letters is particularly poignant, I found that it held me at arms’ length from the characters and their actions. I watched them experience these powerful emotions and although the overall emotional tone of the book was impressively well drawn, as I’ve already stated, I didn’t find myself feeling along with them but observing from a distance.
The other niggle that I had was the use of Czech words and phrases. The way that they’re sprinkled throughout the text is actually a rather nice touch as it grounds the novel very firmly in one specific place and adds an authentic flavour of Czechoslovakia. However, the terms used are rarely explained within the context of the story, and having no experience at all of Czech language, Czech food or Czech cutlure I had no idea what all these things being talked about were. I know that lengthy explanations can sometimes be tedious and laboured to read and if they are words that Pick is used to using because of her Czech heritage then it may just not have come up as an issue, but at least the first time a Czech term occurs it would be nice if there were some sort of explanation of what it means without me having to resort to constant Googling. The simple expedient of adding a glossary to the end of the book would solve this problem wonderfully.
October 12, 2011
Alison Pick's recent novel, Far to go, tells the story of one family's efforts to survive the persecution of Jews in Czechoslovakia during 1938/39. Among the books written on this theme, Pick stands out in that she integrates the personal with the historical. Inspired by her own family history, she interweaves the past events with a present-day narrative thread. One adds to the other's understanding in the reader.
The primary narrator is Marta, an orphaned country girl, dependent on the family of well-to-do Jewish factory owner Pavel Bauer. Working as their young son Pepik's governess, Marta feels very much part of the family. When Germany occupies the western region of Czechoslovakia in 1938, life for the Jewish population there turns increasingly precarious. Pavel moves his family to Prague, convinced that they will be safe there ... However, it is only a question of time, before the German Army occupies Prague. Torn between her deep feelings for the Bauers and for her pro-Nazi German lover, Marta's perspective on the unfolding events is hovering between trust in the Bauer's continuing ability to care for her and her fear that remaining with the family might jeopardize her own safety. Her loyalty to her employer is soon tested.
The novel opens with the second, present-day story, written in the second person. Its narrator is early on introduced as a researcher, inquiring into the life of those who escaped as children from Czechoslovakia thanks to the Kindertransporte. The narrator's "project" also explains to the reader the "reprinting" of various letters throughout the story. They inform us, primarily through their "file notes", of the fate of several of the novel's characters, post 1939.
Overall, Far to go is a very moving story, simply told, that concentrates on the daily life that Marta and "her" family are confronting. The dangers hovering over the family are palpable. The tense atmosphere in Prague of the day is convincingly depicted. At times, though, I found the choice of narrative voice too limiting, Marta demonstrates a tendency for reducing complexity to oversimplification. The characterization of Pepik's parents and their interactions, also with Marta, seem simplistic and soon predictable. The narrative thread centred on the Kindertransport and one child's fate later on is much too brief and, to me, does not convincingly convey the depth of trauma experienced in cases like this. We have, of course, powerful and deeply moving accounts on this topic, whether in fiction or not. W.G. Sebald's Austerlitz stands out for me as the most memorable among them. Pick's novel is ambitious in attempting to deal with several daunting topics, some very personal to her. For me the balance and weight of the different threads are not totally successful.
The primary narrator is Marta, an orphaned country girl, dependent on the family of well-to-do Jewish factory owner Pavel Bauer. Working as their young son Pepik's governess, Marta feels very much part of the family. When Germany occupies the western region of Czechoslovakia in 1938, life for the Jewish population there turns increasingly precarious. Pavel moves his family to Prague, convinced that they will be safe there ... However, it is only a question of time, before the German Army occupies Prague. Torn between her deep feelings for the Bauers and for her pro-Nazi German lover, Marta's perspective on the unfolding events is hovering between trust in the Bauer's continuing ability to care for her and her fear that remaining with the family might jeopardize her own safety. Her loyalty to her employer is soon tested.
The novel opens with the second, present-day story, written in the second person. Its narrator is early on introduced as a researcher, inquiring into the life of those who escaped as children from Czechoslovakia thanks to the Kindertransporte. The narrator's "project" also explains to the reader the "reprinting" of various letters throughout the story. They inform us, primarily through their "file notes", of the fate of several of the novel's characters, post 1939.
Overall, Far to go is a very moving story, simply told, that concentrates on the daily life that Marta and "her" family are confronting. The dangers hovering over the family are palpable. The tense atmosphere in Prague of the day is convincingly depicted. At times, though, I found the choice of narrative voice too limiting, Marta demonstrates a tendency for reducing complexity to oversimplification. The characterization of Pepik's parents and their interactions, also with Marta, seem simplistic and soon predictable. The narrative thread centred on the Kindertransport and one child's fate later on is much too brief and, to me, does not convincingly convey the depth of trauma experienced in cases like this. We have, of course, powerful and deeply moving accounts on this topic, whether in fiction or not. W.G. Sebald's Austerlitz stands out for me as the most memorable among them. Pick's novel is ambitious in attempting to deal with several daunting topics, some very personal to her. For me the balance and weight of the different threads are not totally successful.
July 23, 2014
Far to Go is a novel that is very well written and has all that I expected from it - lyrical prose and emotional content grounded in excellent research punctuated with quotes from the lives of many of the people involved in the tragedy of Europe in the late 1930's and a short note regarding their ultimate fate.
A story of Jewish people and gentiles, of relationships straining or blossoming under the extreme stress of the period, of a time of madness at which we sometimes look back and wonder "how could it happen?", though of course always the unstated "can it happen again?" lurks in the back of the mind.
The storyline is well described in the blurb, though it has its share of unexpected twists and turns, but the novel stands out for its style first and foremost - the voice of the present day narrator and the third person tense and dramatic events of the late 1930's.
The book flows so well that you cannot put it down when started and I found it well deserving of its Booker long-listing; if there is a niggle that stopped me from truly being blown away by Far to Go is its similarity in theme and even somewhat in structure with 2009's The Glass Room by Simon Mawer - another Booker long-listed novel - though Far to Go is very tightly written while The Glass Room scattered a lot in its last third taking away somewhat from its power.
Of course the novels differ a lot too - style, characters and their destiny etc, but the atmosphere, period, place... are the same and since both are pitch perfect in that as well as being superbly researched they bring the same feeling to the reader to a large extent
I will close with a quote from Far to Go, quote that is part of the "witness testimony" that starts each of the five parts of the novel and adds so much to this novel:
"19 January 1939
Dear Pavel and Anneliese,
I am sorry to have been out of contact for so long. All is well. Business continues apace. I trust you enjoy your books as usual. The one before The Castle is excellent. Please give my love to Alžběta if you see her. And to the little girls.
Best regards, Max
(FILE UNDER: Stein, Max. Died Auschwitz, 1943)"
A story of Jewish people and gentiles, of relationships straining or blossoming under the extreme stress of the period, of a time of madness at which we sometimes look back and wonder "how could it happen?", though of course always the unstated "can it happen again?" lurks in the back of the mind.
The storyline is well described in the blurb, though it has its share of unexpected twists and turns, but the novel stands out for its style first and foremost - the voice of the present day narrator and the third person tense and dramatic events of the late 1930's.
The book flows so well that you cannot put it down when started and I found it well deserving of its Booker long-listing; if there is a niggle that stopped me from truly being blown away by Far to Go is its similarity in theme and even somewhat in structure with 2009's The Glass Room by Simon Mawer - another Booker long-listed novel - though Far to Go is very tightly written while The Glass Room scattered a lot in its last third taking away somewhat from its power.
Of course the novels differ a lot too - style, characters and their destiny etc, but the atmosphere, period, place... are the same and since both are pitch perfect in that as well as being superbly researched they bring the same feeling to the reader to a large extent
I will close with a quote from Far to Go, quote that is part of the "witness testimony" that starts each of the five parts of the novel and adds so much to this novel:
"19 January 1939
Dear Pavel and Anneliese,
I am sorry to have been out of contact for so long. All is well. Business continues apace. I trust you enjoy your books as usual. The one before The Castle is excellent. Please give my love to Alžběta if you see her. And to the little girls.
Best regards, Max
(FILE UNDER: Stein, Max. Died Auschwitz, 1943)"
December 22, 2019
One of the best books about the World War II I have read in a long time. It is not really about the war, because the story ends springtime 1939 en takes up sixty years later. It is mostly about the imposing threat. We know what happened in the war, we know that a tale about a Jewish family in that time can never have a happy ending. Nevertheless you keep on reading and hoping this particular family will find a way out.
What takes up an important part of the story is the train with Jewish kids, who were allowed to leave in 1939 and be sent away to safety in the UK. Throughout the book there are hints to this train, in the end the story of the children on the train unfolds itself.
I really recommend it as a 'must-read' book.
Een van de beste boeken over de tweede wereldoorlog die ik de laatste jaren las. Het speelt echter niet eens echt in de oorlog. Het verhaal houdt voorjaar 1939 op om zestig jaar later weer verder te gaan. Het is een boek waarin de dreiging van de Nazi's steeds dichterbij komt voor een Joods gezin. Iedereen weet wat er in de oorlog gebeurde, dat er geen happy endings kunnen zijn met Joodse gezinnen, maar je blijft gefascineerd doorlezen, hopend op een uitweg voor dit specifieke gezin. Je wordt het boek ingezogen.
Wat een rode draad vormt in het boek zijn de Kindertransporten. Joodse kinderen die het land mochten verlaten om bij pleeggezinnen in het buitenland te gaan wonen en daar de oorlog af te wachten. In de goede hoop na de oorlog weer herenigd te worden met hun ouders..... Tegen het eind van dit boek ligt de nadruk van het verhaal op zo'n Kindertransport.
Ik raad het boek echt aan als een 'moet-je-lezen' boek. Begin je eraan, dan leg je het niet meer weg totdat het uit is.
What takes up an important part of the story is the train with Jewish kids, who were allowed to leave in 1939 and be sent away to safety in the UK. Throughout the book there are hints to this train, in the end the story of the children on the train unfolds itself.
I really recommend it as a 'must-read' book.
Een van de beste boeken over de tweede wereldoorlog die ik de laatste jaren las. Het speelt echter niet eens echt in de oorlog. Het verhaal houdt voorjaar 1939 op om zestig jaar later weer verder te gaan. Het is een boek waarin de dreiging van de Nazi's steeds dichterbij komt voor een Joods gezin. Iedereen weet wat er in de oorlog gebeurde, dat er geen happy endings kunnen zijn met Joodse gezinnen, maar je blijft gefascineerd doorlezen, hopend op een uitweg voor dit specifieke gezin. Je wordt het boek ingezogen.
Wat een rode draad vormt in het boek zijn de Kindertransporten. Joodse kinderen die het land mochten verlaten om bij pleeggezinnen in het buitenland te gaan wonen en daar de oorlog af te wachten. In de goede hoop na de oorlog weer herenigd te worden met hun ouders..... Tegen het eind van dit boek ligt de nadruk van het verhaal op zo'n Kindertransport.
Ik raad het boek echt aan als een 'moet-je-lezen' boek. Begin je eraan, dan leg je het niet meer weg totdat het uit is.
November 3, 2016
Marta works as a governess for Pavel and Annelise Bauer, an affluent Jewish family in Czechoslovakia. When the Sudetenland is given up to Germany in the Munich Agreement, in an effort to restrain Hitler, the Bauers (though secular Jews) fear for their lives. They, thus, flee to Prague with Marta in tow. Believing they have escaped Hitler, they settle into new lifes. That is until Marta betrays them and the consequences of her actions will have a marked effect on her own life.
This is the type of novel that I am drawn to naturally. No matter how many novels I read about WWII, I do not tire of them. My sister has said that I like ´sad books´ but I find these novels untimately uplifting. Having said that, this particular novel did not entirely work for me and I am not sure exactly why. It has all the right elements and the prose is good. There is something with the structure of the novel that made it difficult to connect to the characters. Partially based on the author´s family, the novel follows the Bauers as they flee to safety or what they believe is a safe haven. It would have been good to know what especifically are the fictionalized parts but that is not disclosed. I find myself torn, I actually liked the book. It was a refresher on history (the Munich Agreement, the Kindertransport) and it has surprising twists. A decent book just not quite what I expected.
This is the type of novel that I am drawn to naturally. No matter how many novels I read about WWII, I do not tire of them. My sister has said that I like ´sad books´ but I find these novels untimately uplifting. Having said that, this particular novel did not entirely work for me and I am not sure exactly why. It has all the right elements and the prose is good. There is something with the structure of the novel that made it difficult to connect to the characters. Partially based on the author´s family, the novel follows the Bauers as they flee to safety or what they believe is a safe haven. It would have been good to know what especifically are the fictionalized parts but that is not disclosed. I find myself torn, I actually liked the book. It was a refresher on history (the Munich Agreement, the Kindertransport) and it has surprising twists. A decent book just not quite what I expected.
October 24, 2015
Van kinderen die uit Tsjechoslowakije naar Engeland op kindertransport zijn gezet wist ik niets. Ze zijn van een wisse dood gered maar hun hele geschiedenis was weggevaagd. Wat weet je nog als je als vierjarige of soms nog jonger naar een ander land getransporteerd, wordt waar je de taal niet spreekt en waar je niets van begrijpt?
April 6, 2021
“I wish this were a happy story”, this tale begins. It’s a good warning. This is the tale of the invasion of Czechoslovakia by the Nazis in early WW2. Patel and Annaliese Bauer, their son Pepik, and nanny Marta are all shown adapting or not to the creeping evil that washes over their country- the gradually increasing restrictions, the enclosing sense of panic, the compromises one and all make- including the narrator of this story.
It is so well done! Though most of the characters were unsympathetic, I could not help but feel for them all, tied as they were to a doom so all-encompassing.
Throughout the book there are excerpts from the family letters, unfailingly ended with a postscript of their name, date of death, camp where killed.
I have been aware of the tragedy of Ww2 all of my life, I even lived in Germany for some time and was vaguely revolted by the way the fruit trees were so fertile (all that blood meal?). But this story affected me quite strongly and it is for that reason I highly recommend it. It is far too easy as time goes on to forget the inhumanity that occurred (and to be fair, is still occurring, with different victims and perpetrators). Sometimes a good story brings it all back, reminds us of how close we dance to a similar situation as fascism returns, as prejudice creates violence, as we watch it go by without comment. This story is a good, involving, and thought-provoking slap upside the head.
The ending has surprises but it will be the characters that pull you on.
Definitely worth a read.
It is so well done! Though most of the characters were unsympathetic, I could not help but feel for them all, tied as they were to a doom so all-encompassing.
Throughout the book there are excerpts from the family letters, unfailingly ended with a postscript of their name, date of death, camp where killed.
I have been aware of the tragedy of Ww2 all of my life, I even lived in Germany for some time and was vaguely revolted by the way the fruit trees were so fertile (all that blood meal?). But this story affected me quite strongly and it is for that reason I highly recommend it. It is far too easy as time goes on to forget the inhumanity that occurred (and to be fair, is still occurring, with different victims and perpetrators). Sometimes a good story brings it all back, reminds us of how close we dance to a similar situation as fascism returns, as prejudice creates violence, as we watch it go by without comment. This story is a good, involving, and thought-provoking slap upside the head.
The ending has surprises but it will be the characters that pull you on.
Definitely worth a read.
March 18, 2021
This is such a beautiful and heart wrenching book about the German occupation of Czechoslovakia, particularly the choices parents had to make whether or not to leave the country, or send their children away on the Kindertransport trains.
It is written as a frame narrative (story within a story) which blend together beautifully.
I feel I have read a lot of WWII novels, but I continue to be surprised how I learn a little more about a facet of history that should not be forgotten.
It is written as a frame narrative (story within a story) which blend together beautifully.
I feel I have read a lot of WWII novels, but I continue to be surprised how I learn a little more about a facet of history that should not be forgotten.
August 4, 2011
One of the longlisted novels for the Booker Prize 2011, Far to Go is certainly attracting a lot of attention from readers and all with good reason - it's a refreshing look at a period of history which should never grow stale in our minds no matter how many years go by.
The main focus of the novel is on the Bauers, a young, secular Jewish family living in Sudetenland, Czechoslovakia which has been invaded by Germany. Pavel, a wealthy factory owner, Anneliese, his stunning, self obsessed wife and their six year old son, Pepik flee to Prague hoping to leave the ominous shadow of the *** behind them. Marta, their dutiful Gentile governess, accompanies them, not so much out of duty but because they're all she's got - she doesn't hold Jews in the highest regard but, like a lot of ordinary Europeans caught up in the war, she probably wouldn't be able to tell you why. Eventually, all hopes are lost apart from those pinned on little Pepik who is sent on the Kinderstransport to the UK, hoping to be reunited with his family and Marta after the war.
Despite having studied WWII as part of my History O Level course (many, many moons ago..) my knowledge has remained rather sketchy until recently when I have had the good fortune to read some excellent fiction set during this period. Reading about the Bauers and their efforts (including bribery) to get Pepik out of Czechoslovakia will enlighten readers about the Kinderstransport and the heartache of separation albeit for a greater good, or what they thought was a brighter future...
As well as educating the reader, this novel also achieves a more balanced view of events as the narrator who divulges the Bauers' fate and who also holds their fate in her hands, is a Gentile with no political aspirations. Marta, the governess, is more concerned with looking after Pepik and protecting him from the growing anti-semitic feeling which is gripping Sudetenland. She has little in common with her conniving adulterous lover, Ernst, who hopes to gain financially from Pavel's downfall. Still, she's no saint either and self-preservation is at the forefront of everyone's mind be they Jew or Gentile, Czech or German.
What I love about Far to Go is its simplicity and unpretentiousness - the characters are flawed, real flesh and blood creations who find themselves in the most surreal of situations and whilst they aren't always the most likeable they are all the more credible as a result. Yes, it's a story which will affect you emotionally but it doesn't dwell on sentimentality and presents the truth in simple prose, in black and white. The one minor difficulty I did have was getting into the rhythm of the story as several narrative strands are introduced very quickly, almost on top of each other - the story of the Bauers set in 1939, a contemporary storyline whose narrator remains a mystery until later and also letters written by Jewish parents to the children they sent to the UK. However, this is just a minor quibble for me and it quickly becomes a compelling, coherent read.
Alison Pick has carved a fresh, fictional work out of the past experiences of her Czech grandparents who fled to Canada following Hitler's invasion of their native country. It's a fitting tribute to all those who did not survive and those children who were never reunited with their parents.
The main focus of the novel is on the Bauers, a young, secular Jewish family living in Sudetenland, Czechoslovakia which has been invaded by Germany. Pavel, a wealthy factory owner, Anneliese, his stunning, self obsessed wife and their six year old son, Pepik flee to Prague hoping to leave the ominous shadow of the *** behind them. Marta, their dutiful Gentile governess, accompanies them, not so much out of duty but because they're all she's got - she doesn't hold Jews in the highest regard but, like a lot of ordinary Europeans caught up in the war, she probably wouldn't be able to tell you why. Eventually, all hopes are lost apart from those pinned on little Pepik who is sent on the Kinderstransport to the UK, hoping to be reunited with his family and Marta after the war.
Despite having studied WWII as part of my History O Level course (many, many moons ago..) my knowledge has remained rather sketchy until recently when I have had the good fortune to read some excellent fiction set during this period. Reading about the Bauers and their efforts (including bribery) to get Pepik out of Czechoslovakia will enlighten readers about the Kinderstransport and the heartache of separation albeit for a greater good, or what they thought was a brighter future...
As well as educating the reader, this novel also achieves a more balanced view of events as the narrator who divulges the Bauers' fate and who also holds their fate in her hands, is a Gentile with no political aspirations. Marta, the governess, is more concerned with looking after Pepik and protecting him from the growing anti-semitic feeling which is gripping Sudetenland. She has little in common with her conniving adulterous lover, Ernst, who hopes to gain financially from Pavel's downfall. Still, she's no saint either and self-preservation is at the forefront of everyone's mind be they Jew or Gentile, Czech or German.
What I love about Far to Go is its simplicity and unpretentiousness - the characters are flawed, real flesh and blood creations who find themselves in the most surreal of situations and whilst they aren't always the most likeable they are all the more credible as a result. Yes, it's a story which will affect you emotionally but it doesn't dwell on sentimentality and presents the truth in simple prose, in black and white. The one minor difficulty I did have was getting into the rhythm of the story as several narrative strands are introduced very quickly, almost on top of each other - the story of the Bauers set in 1939, a contemporary storyline whose narrator remains a mystery until later and also letters written by Jewish parents to the children they sent to the UK. However, this is just a minor quibble for me and it quickly becomes a compelling, coherent read.
Alison Pick has carved a fresh, fictional work out of the past experiences of her Czech grandparents who fled to Canada following Hitler's invasion of their native country. It's a fitting tribute to all those who did not survive and those children who were never reunited with their parents.
September 23, 2011
Yet another book on the Booker longlist that didn't make it to the shortlist. Once again, I trust the quality of this book speaks volumes about the quality of the books that did make it to the shortlist. First, a confession. I generally avoid holocaust novels. Perhaps that's not true, but I don't find myself racing out to read them. I never read nor saw "Schindler's List." I did see "The Reader" but never read it. I do read Lily Brett's holocaust novels, but I never go back and reread them--that's a privilege I reserve for her non-fiction only. Once of the nest movies I have seen so far this year was "Sarah's Key" about the role of the French people in the mass incarceration and deportation of Jews to concentration camps during WWII. But I couldn't bring myself to see a similar movie about the same topic starring Jean Reno, released just a few months later. And I went to Amsterdam and didn't visit Anne Frank's house. But I did see "The Pianist." So, in short, I approached Alison Pick's novel--which is, essentially, the story of a Jewish family from Czechoslovakia during WWII--with some trepidation. I need not have worried.
There are no camps other than what we know is hovering in the background. This is a novel about how people lived as they slowly watched their lives collapsing and shrinking around them. It does not shy away from the difficult issues...about how war--a world thrown into chaos--brought out the worst in people; about how a marriage slowly disintegrates as the Bauers struggle to survive in the face of the inevitable. Where one might expect that the couple found solace in each other's arms, their marriage actually falls apart as they bicker and differ over everything, except, ultimately, the goal of saving their son. The novel is ostensibly framed around the kindertransport--the trains of Jewish children that were saved from certain death by the "kindness" of British families and businessman who organized for them to leave German-occupied territory during the war. Part of what Pick is interested in exploring is the nature of survival for these children--the allegedly "lucky" ones, who emerged from the war alive but without any surviving family; often few memories of their origins; and no sense of their heritage.
I perhaps would have liked Pick to push this further--to explore this complicated legacy a little more as the little bit she does is so tantalizingly compelling. She demonstrates so clearly how a few breakdowns in translation can frame people's memories for life.
The problem with holocaust novels is that we know how they end--there are no surprises. I can't promise this is a novel that ends with hope or redemption or anything but sadness, but it is well worth reading, nonetheless.
There are no camps other than what we know is hovering in the background. This is a novel about how people lived as they slowly watched their lives collapsing and shrinking around them. It does not shy away from the difficult issues...about how war--a world thrown into chaos--brought out the worst in people; about how a marriage slowly disintegrates as the Bauers struggle to survive in the face of the inevitable. Where one might expect that the couple found solace in each other's arms, their marriage actually falls apart as they bicker and differ over everything, except, ultimately, the goal of saving their son. The novel is ostensibly framed around the kindertransport--the trains of Jewish children that were saved from certain death by the "kindness" of British families and businessman who organized for them to leave German-occupied territory during the war. Part of what Pick is interested in exploring is the nature of survival for these children--the allegedly "lucky" ones, who emerged from the war alive but without any surviving family; often few memories of their origins; and no sense of their heritage.
I perhaps would have liked Pick to push this further--to explore this complicated legacy a little more as the little bit she does is so tantalizingly compelling. She demonstrates so clearly how a few breakdowns in translation can frame people's memories for life.
The problem with holocaust novels is that we know how they end--there are no surprises. I can't promise this is a novel that ends with hope or redemption or anything but sadness, but it is well worth reading, nonetheless.
September 15, 2011
"You wanted to protect him? Look what your protection has done. Now he can't get out of the country at all."
"Who was it? The secretary?"
"Yes, the Secretary. And you can guess what he said"
"There must be something we can do"
"No," Pavel Said. "He made it very clear. The decision was Winston's, in fact. Because, you see, there are so many Jewish children desperate to get out that is simply doesn't make sense to send those with a Christian baptismal certificate."
Far To Go: Alison Pick.
A family living in Sudetenland in a peaceful life.
A mother, Annalise, Father, Pavel, and Son, Pepik. Along with his nanny Marta.
Hitler however is on the move, and is soon able to take Sudetenland, and the family is forced to move to Prague. Although this is soon over run as well.
The family is forced to make some heartbreaking decisions to keep their family safe, but also to keep Pepik, their only son, in safe keeping, and out of the hands of Hitler.
The story, which is most entirely in Marta's point of view, takes a sudden shift to Pepik.
He is able to, after some 'convincing' from his father, able to leave on one of the last 'Kindertransport' trains out of Prague.
Pepik takes the story at this point, and goes into a 6 year olds view of the Kindertransport, and his thoughts, feelings, fears and hopes, as he makes his way to, and stays with his first foster family in Scotland. Also the heart wrenching period of time alongside his foster brother, and the transition from his first foster family, to an orphanage.
My View:
This book is absolutely terrible, but good.
I have always been interested in the time of Hitler, and the Holocaust, and stories like these, make my skin crawl. Even more so, since I am at least half German.
The book is, although fictional, written based off of Alison's own research, into her own family history, and events that she pieced together, although the accuracy is, of course, in question.
I also love, that at the end, it has a mini-memoir about Alison and her genealogy quest, along with her decision to convert to her ancestor religion of Judaism, a religion that had been weeded out of her immediate family during the Holocaust with the safer religion of Christianity.
It's a GOOD book!
I will most likely keep this book in my mind as one worthy to read again.
Picked it up at my local library.
- CJ
"Who was it? The secretary?"
"Yes, the Secretary. And you can guess what he said"
"There must be something we can do"
"No," Pavel Said. "He made it very clear. The decision was Winston's, in fact. Because, you see, there are so many Jewish children desperate to get out that is simply doesn't make sense to send those with a Christian baptismal certificate."
Far To Go: Alison Pick.
A family living in Sudetenland in a peaceful life.
A mother, Annalise, Father, Pavel, and Son, Pepik. Along with his nanny Marta.
Hitler however is on the move, and is soon able to take Sudetenland, and the family is forced to move to Prague. Although this is soon over run as well.
The family is forced to make some heartbreaking decisions to keep their family safe, but also to keep Pepik, their only son, in safe keeping, and out of the hands of Hitler.
The story, which is most entirely in Marta's point of view, takes a sudden shift to Pepik.
He is able to, after some 'convincing' from his father, able to leave on one of the last 'Kindertransport' trains out of Prague.
Pepik takes the story at this point, and goes into a 6 year olds view of the Kindertransport, and his thoughts, feelings, fears and hopes, as he makes his way to, and stays with his first foster family in Scotland. Also the heart wrenching period of time alongside his foster brother, and the transition from his first foster family, to an orphanage.
My View:
This book is absolutely terrible, but good.
I have always been interested in the time of Hitler, and the Holocaust, and stories like these, make my skin crawl. Even more so, since I am at least half German.
The book is, although fictional, written based off of Alison's own research, into her own family history, and events that she pieced together, although the accuracy is, of course, in question.
I also love, that at the end, it has a mini-memoir about Alison and her genealogy quest, along with her decision to convert to her ancestor religion of Judaism, a religion that had been weeded out of her immediate family during the Holocaust with the safer religion of Christianity.
It's a GOOD book!
I will most likely keep this book in my mind as one worthy to read again.
Picked it up at my local library.
- CJ
August 2, 2011
A great piece of literature. It goes beyond the politics and the labels of the people of 1938-1943 Czechoslovakia and deals with the human conditions of that era and beyond to our time.
Page 6-7
"I wish this were a happy story. A story to mae you doubt, and despair, and then have your hopes redeemed so you could believe again, at the last minute, in the essential goodness of the world around us and the people in it. There are few things in life, though, that turn out for the best, with real happy endings.
And what am I doing, talking about endings so soon? The truth is, I don't even know where to begin. As a young academic I was taught to frame my research in clinical terms, to take the stance of a disinterested observer. That was how to court fellowships, publication, and promotion. I was told that the relationship between professor and subject was like that between courteous strangers, when in fact the thing that draws us to unwrap a story, a particular story, is personal.
If I've learned one thing over my very long career, it is this: we research what we recognize. We are looking into our own darkness.
I've lived a quiet existence, working lat in my office, closed in by towers of books and periodicals. Avoiding faculty parties, the clusters of draduate students drinking pints in the lounge. I take my noon and evening meals along at my desk. I've been lonely, yes. In that way I might have been better to leave all of this alone, to let - what is the expression? - to let sleeping dogs lie. After everything that's happened, what has this story given me? It has only aggravated my restlessness, that need to search for what isn't there. In what I've found there's been relief, true, but also disappointment. When there's nothing left to be uncovered.
What I'm saying to you now is, don't get your hopes up. Don't expect some thunderclap, some burst of enlightenment. Life isn't like that - not yours, and not mine. Low expectations create the most favourable outcomes.
You'll see what I mean."
Page 6-7
"I wish this were a happy story. A story to mae you doubt, and despair, and then have your hopes redeemed so you could believe again, at the last minute, in the essential goodness of the world around us and the people in it. There are few things in life, though, that turn out for the best, with real happy endings.
And what am I doing, talking about endings so soon? The truth is, I don't even know where to begin. As a young academic I was taught to frame my research in clinical terms, to take the stance of a disinterested observer. That was how to court fellowships, publication, and promotion. I was told that the relationship between professor and subject was like that between courteous strangers, when in fact the thing that draws us to unwrap a story, a particular story, is personal.
If I've learned one thing over my very long career, it is this: we research what we recognize. We are looking into our own darkness.
I've lived a quiet existence, working lat in my office, closed in by towers of books and periodicals. Avoiding faculty parties, the clusters of draduate students drinking pints in the lounge. I take my noon and evening meals along at my desk. I've been lonely, yes. In that way I might have been better to leave all of this alone, to let - what is the expression? - to let sleeping dogs lie. After everything that's happened, what has this story given me? It has only aggravated my restlessness, that need to search for what isn't there. In what I've found there's been relief, true, but also disappointment. When there's nothing left to be uncovered.
What I'm saying to you now is, don't get your hopes up. Don't expect some thunderclap, some burst of enlightenment. Life isn't like that - not yours, and not mine. Low expectations create the most favourable outcomes.
You'll see what I mean."
July 12, 2011
I have a fascination with the Holocaust and things surrounding it. I know that sounds bad, but I think there is part of me that will never understand, never grasp, how something like that could happen. In a way, I am in awe of Hilter. How he could command so many people to do his will. I am not saying I respect him or condone him in any way. I just can't believe that one person was able to have that much control over a nation. Although, today in the US, I do see my fair share of what I would consider brainwashing...
About the book - It was a story about Nazi Germany and the Holocaust, but not told in the typical way most books about this subject are. It really was about the lives of a Jewish family living at that time.
I very much enjoyed the book and the author's style of writing. It was an interesting perspective and had a bit of love story and mystery in it too. It was a very easy read that ended up being very heavy.
About the book - It was a story about Nazi Germany and the Holocaust, but not told in the typical way most books about this subject are. It really was about the lives of a Jewish family living at that time.
I very much enjoyed the book and the author's style of writing. It was an interesting perspective and had a bit of love story and mystery in it too. It was a very easy read that ended up being very heavy.
December 25, 2015
Tíživé a silné téma očima jedné z mnoha rodin, které podobný osud postihl. A vlastně ještě lépe - očima vychovatelky jejich syna, která má jistý odstup a přitom je tak moc součástí těchto osudů. Napsáno velice poutavě, autorka zvolila prolínání dvou dob, současnosti, kdy potkáváme autorku onoho příběhu, a minulosti v letech 1938-39, kdy se ten příběh odehrává. K tomu ilustraci v podobě dobových dopisů, které dokreslují atmosféru, jež hutní každou stránkou. K tomu mnoho otázek, které se mi honily hlavou. Jak muselo být těm lidem, kteří do poslední chvíle zoufale odmítali věřit tomu, co se proslýchalo o "židovské otázce"? Jak strašně obtížné bylo rozhodnutí zachránit své dítě tím, že ho pošlou do neznáma? Byla bych toho já vůbec schopna? Na příběhu jedné z mnoha rodin je vykreslena tragická a pohnutá historie silně a působivě.
April 21, 2011
Title: Far To Go
Author: Alison Pick
Date Published: May 2011
ISBN: 978-0-06-203462-5
Publisher: Harper Perennial
Pages: 368
Genre: Historical Fiction; Contemporary Fiction
Rating: 4.5 out of 5
Publisher’s Book Summary: When Czechoslovakia relinquishes the Sudetenland to Hitler, the powerful influence of Nazi propaganda sweeps through towns and villages like a sinister vanguard of the Reich's advancing army. A fiercely patriotic secular Jew, Pavel Bauer is helpless to prevent his world from unraveling as first his government, then his business partners, then his neighbors turn their back on his affluent, once-beloved family. Only the Bauers' adoring governess, Marta, sticks by Pavel, his wife, Anneliese, and their little son, Pepik, bound by her deep affection for her employers and friends. But when Marta learns of their impending betrayal at the hands of her lover, Ernst, Pavel's best friend, she is paralyzed by her own fear of discovery—even as the endangered family for whom she cares so deeply struggles with the most difficult decision of their lives.
Interwoven with a present-day narrative that gradually reveals the fate of the Bauer family during and after the war, Far to Go is a riveting family epic, love story, and psychological drama.
My Thoughts: World War II, Hitler's Reign of Terror and the Nazi's attack on Jewish people has become a very popular topic with authors. Often the stories are sagas, spanning numerous years, a multitude of characters, issues and topics, their impact felt far and wide. Alison Pick, however, chose to write a small, intimate and personal story about one family living in Czechoslovakia, relating their experience amid Hitler's violent campaign in the late 1930s into the early ‘40s. The story is fiction but I wondered, while reading it, if there were any threads of truth. This possibility occurred to me when I opened the book one day and my eyes fell on a page before the story begins. The author has listed the names of people I believe to be her family members along with the years of their births and deaths. Some have the last name "Pick", some "Bauer", the name of the family in the story. All of the older people listed died in 1942 or 1943 which sent a shiver down my spine. I was very touched by this list as it made the story seem so much more real.
Far To Go is an engagingly written, captivating and poignant story. Incidentally, Ms. Pick is also a poet. As such, her writing is simple, elegant and magnetic. She draws you in with beautiful phrasing and her writing is rhythmic. I found it difficult to put the book down but at times, had trouble continuing because of the distressful, foreboding nature of the story.
The Bauer family, Pavel, Anneliese and their 5-year old son, Pepik as well as his nanny, Marta, are close, happy and loving when the book begins. But as the threat of Hitler and the Nazi's taking control of Czechoslovakia grows, fear and worry cause tension and bickering between Pavel and Anneliese. He’s adamant about remaining in Czechoslovakia, their home country, but she wants to flee. It's not long before Pepik no longer sings or laughs.
Dialogue is a substantial part of the story and the character’s conversations are realistic. Ms. Pick is adept at conveying each character's emotion through their words as they discuss the fate of Czechoslovakia and their own personal future. She also manages to communicate a lot of important information in the dialogue, but it never feels forced or artificial. This is just one aspect of Ms. Pick's gift for writing.
The majority of Far To Go is told from a third person (omniscient) point of view. If any character can be said to dominate the narrative, however, it's Marta, Pepik's nanny and the Bauer's maid. Only 22, she often seems much older, although she is naive and lives in denial of the Nazi‘s taking control. She's been with the Bauers for many years and loves them, though her actions, occasionally, belie this truth. Marta didn't have an easy childhood and it becomes apparent, early in the story, that she’s often insecure and unsure of herself. She's desperate to know that she’s loved by someone, anyone, but especially a man. Marta will do almost anything to make this a reality. She's immature and ignores things that upset her, pretending they never happened. We are privy to the many conversations and arguments Marta has with herself, enlightening us about her thoughts and motivations. Ms. Pick has created an amazingly complex and relatable character here, and I found myself sympathizing with her one second while wanting to shake her the next!
There is a lot of sadness in this novel but I don’t think anything is more heart-breaking than Pepik’s story. Though a secondary character, he is of great importance. Only five and six years old for much of the story, he is a happy, spoiled little boy doted on by three very loving adults. Pavel and Anneliese make the ultimate sacrifice for Pepik Ms. Pick successfully portrays the extreme difficulty of the decision his parents have in saving Pepik because it involves sending him away on his own. It’s a rare person who won’t shed tears at the vivid and memorable scene in the train station when Pavel questions his decision. Pepik is a realistic, three-dimensional child and his behavior seems like that of many children his age. He doesn’t understand what’s happening and displays the resiliency children are known for, making the best of his situation, hoping and expecting that soon things will change.
The book is divided into five sections, marking the significant aspects of the story as it progresses. Each section begins with a brief chapter from an unknown, at the time, first person narrator who, unlike the rest of the characters, lives in the present. This narrator is also related, in some way, to the Bauer family. This unknown person has done a lot of research on Czechoslavakia, Prague and Hitler. He/she is also sad, lonely and seems to be searching for someone or something. I found this part of the book awkward and a little bit confusing because it clashes with the narrative style and viewpoint of the majority of the chapters. Although I understood who the narrator was by the end, I would have liked this part of the story to be told in a last separate section, since a series of questions are raised by the small chapters, just as others are answered.
Apart from this inconsistency, the author manages to take a subject that lends itself to being told in bold strokes and over large swaths of time, the equivalent of a Hollywood blockbuster, and writes a poignant, intimate family story. Ms. Pick doesn’t ignore the horrors of the Nazis as it’s always there in the background. But the focus is on the Bauer family and the people close to them whom, though not related, are still part of the dynamic and whose actions have far reaching impact for the family. Character development and plot are what drives this very well written, tightly packaged story that, if you can get past the occasionally jarring change of pace as discussed above, then you will be doing yourself a favor. It’s very much worth letting yourself get lost in this riveting drama about people of a universal nature in a time and place that is nearly impossible to imagine living through.
I received a copy of Far To Go from the publisher through TLC Book Tours
For more about Far To Go and Alison Pick see her website.
Author: Alison Pick
Date Published: May 2011
ISBN: 978-0-06-203462-5
Publisher: Harper Perennial
Pages: 368
Genre: Historical Fiction; Contemporary Fiction
Rating: 4.5 out of 5
Publisher’s Book Summary: When Czechoslovakia relinquishes the Sudetenland to Hitler, the powerful influence of Nazi propaganda sweeps through towns and villages like a sinister vanguard of the Reich's advancing army. A fiercely patriotic secular Jew, Pavel Bauer is helpless to prevent his world from unraveling as first his government, then his business partners, then his neighbors turn their back on his affluent, once-beloved family. Only the Bauers' adoring governess, Marta, sticks by Pavel, his wife, Anneliese, and their little son, Pepik, bound by her deep affection for her employers and friends. But when Marta learns of their impending betrayal at the hands of her lover, Ernst, Pavel's best friend, she is paralyzed by her own fear of discovery—even as the endangered family for whom she cares so deeply struggles with the most difficult decision of their lives.
Interwoven with a present-day narrative that gradually reveals the fate of the Bauer family during and after the war, Far to Go is a riveting family epic, love story, and psychological drama.
My Thoughts: World War II, Hitler's Reign of Terror and the Nazi's attack on Jewish people has become a very popular topic with authors. Often the stories are sagas, spanning numerous years, a multitude of characters, issues and topics, their impact felt far and wide. Alison Pick, however, chose to write a small, intimate and personal story about one family living in Czechoslovakia, relating their experience amid Hitler's violent campaign in the late 1930s into the early ‘40s. The story is fiction but I wondered, while reading it, if there were any threads of truth. This possibility occurred to me when I opened the book one day and my eyes fell on a page before the story begins. The author has listed the names of people I believe to be her family members along with the years of their births and deaths. Some have the last name "Pick", some "Bauer", the name of the family in the story. All of the older people listed died in 1942 or 1943 which sent a shiver down my spine. I was very touched by this list as it made the story seem so much more real.
Far To Go is an engagingly written, captivating and poignant story. Incidentally, Ms. Pick is also a poet. As such, her writing is simple, elegant and magnetic. She draws you in with beautiful phrasing and her writing is rhythmic. I found it difficult to put the book down but at times, had trouble continuing because of the distressful, foreboding nature of the story.
The Bauer family, Pavel, Anneliese and their 5-year old son, Pepik as well as his nanny, Marta, are close, happy and loving when the book begins. But as the threat of Hitler and the Nazi's taking control of Czechoslovakia grows, fear and worry cause tension and bickering between Pavel and Anneliese. He’s adamant about remaining in Czechoslovakia, their home country, but she wants to flee. It's not long before Pepik no longer sings or laughs.
Dialogue is a substantial part of the story and the character’s conversations are realistic. Ms. Pick is adept at conveying each character's emotion through their words as they discuss the fate of Czechoslovakia and their own personal future. She also manages to communicate a lot of important information in the dialogue, but it never feels forced or artificial. This is just one aspect of Ms. Pick's gift for writing.
The majority of Far To Go is told from a third person (omniscient) point of view. If any character can be said to dominate the narrative, however, it's Marta, Pepik's nanny and the Bauer's maid. Only 22, she often seems much older, although she is naive and lives in denial of the Nazi‘s taking control. She's been with the Bauers for many years and loves them, though her actions, occasionally, belie this truth. Marta didn't have an easy childhood and it becomes apparent, early in the story, that she’s often insecure and unsure of herself. She's desperate to know that she’s loved by someone, anyone, but especially a man. Marta will do almost anything to make this a reality. She's immature and ignores things that upset her, pretending they never happened. We are privy to the many conversations and arguments Marta has with herself, enlightening us about her thoughts and motivations. Ms. Pick has created an amazingly complex and relatable character here, and I found myself sympathizing with her one second while wanting to shake her the next!
There is a lot of sadness in this novel but I don’t think anything is more heart-breaking than Pepik’s story. Though a secondary character, he is of great importance. Only five and six years old for much of the story, he is a happy, spoiled little boy doted on by three very loving adults. Pavel and Anneliese make the ultimate sacrifice for Pepik Ms. Pick successfully portrays the extreme difficulty of the decision his parents have in saving Pepik because it involves sending him away on his own. It’s a rare person who won’t shed tears at the vivid and memorable scene in the train station when Pavel questions his decision. Pepik is a realistic, three-dimensional child and his behavior seems like that of many children his age. He doesn’t understand what’s happening and displays the resiliency children are known for, making the best of his situation, hoping and expecting that soon things will change.
The book is divided into five sections, marking the significant aspects of the story as it progresses. Each section begins with a brief chapter from an unknown, at the time, first person narrator who, unlike the rest of the characters, lives in the present. This narrator is also related, in some way, to the Bauer family. This unknown person has done a lot of research on Czechoslavakia, Prague and Hitler. He/she is also sad, lonely and seems to be searching for someone or something. I found this part of the book awkward and a little bit confusing because it clashes with the narrative style and viewpoint of the majority of the chapters. Although I understood who the narrator was by the end, I would have liked this part of the story to be told in a last separate section, since a series of questions are raised by the small chapters, just as others are answered.
Apart from this inconsistency, the author manages to take a subject that lends itself to being told in bold strokes and over large swaths of time, the equivalent of a Hollywood blockbuster, and writes a poignant, intimate family story. Ms. Pick doesn’t ignore the horrors of the Nazis as it’s always there in the background. But the focus is on the Bauer family and the people close to them whom, though not related, are still part of the dynamic and whose actions have far reaching impact for the family. Character development and plot are what drives this very well written, tightly packaged story that, if you can get past the occasionally jarring change of pace as discussed above, then you will be doing yourself a favor. It’s very much worth letting yourself get lost in this riveting drama about people of a universal nature in a time and place that is nearly impossible to imagine living through.
I received a copy of Far To Go from the publisher through TLC Book Tours
For more about Far To Go and Alison Pick see her website.
August 27, 2018
I found this book absorbing and read it quickly. It's well written and the place and time - Czechoslovakia just before the start of WW2 - convincingly evoked. Marta, nanny to the son of of Pavel, owner of a factory and his wife Anneliese, is an interesting character and the story is largely told from her point of view. But I found some parts of the story did not ring quite true.
This could be part of the book's conceit - that it is the work of the narrator, an academic who has spent years researching the Kindertransport, based on her work, but fictionalised. As a resolution to the story, this felt contrived.
The male characters are two dimensional and the relationship between the two female characters is unrealistic, hingeing on Marta secretly saving Anneliese's life. The plot required some explanation of why the family kept Marta with them but this seemed overly dramatic. And the crux of the story, Pepik's experience of the Kindertransport, is described in a way that was somehow imaginatively limited. I've not come across other novels about the Kindertransport: this could have been a very original work but it seemed to be full of cliches.
I was left with some nagging questions. How did Pavel hear about Nicholas Winton and know how to contact him? How did he manage to reverse the original decision not to take Pepik?
This could be part of the book's conceit - that it is the work of the narrator, an academic who has spent years researching the Kindertransport, based on her work, but fictionalised. As a resolution to the story, this felt contrived.
The male characters are two dimensional and the relationship between the two female characters is unrealistic, hingeing on Marta secretly saving Anneliese's life. The plot required some explanation of why the family kept Marta with them but this seemed overly dramatic. And the crux of the story, Pepik's experience of the Kindertransport, is described in a way that was somehow imaginatively limited. I've not come across other novels about the Kindertransport: this could have been a very original work but it seemed to be full of cliches.
I was left with some nagging questions. How did Pavel hear about Nicholas Winton and know how to contact him? How did he manage to reverse the original decision not to take Pepik?
August 4, 2011
Would opening words such as these turn you away from a book?
"I wish this were a happy story. A story to make you doubt, and despair, and then have your hopes redeemed so you could believe again, at the last minute, in the essential goodness of the world around us and the people in it. There are few things in life, though, that turn out for the best, with real happy endings."
They shouldn't. They're spoken by the world-weary but compassionate modern day narrator of a generations-old tale. The narrator leads those not stymied by that opening into the compelling story of an unusually courageous family facing increasingly troubling and demanding challenges, dilemmas, changes and decisions in the face of the start of World War II. While that might sound daunting and indeed, not a happy story as the narrator warns, it's the narrator's own unwitting warmth that will draw you in, that counterbalances the grim aspects of the unfolding story, and ultimately offers forms of hope and redemption, more than the narrator would even credit.
The Bauers, Pavel and Anneliese and their six-year-old son Pepik, are a well-off, secular Jewish family living a quiet life in a small town in the Bohemia region of western Czechoslovakia in the late 1930s. Their story begins with a jolt, as they learn of violence touching their extended family, as rumours of the growing Nazi occupation start to intrude on their comparatively idyllic existence. The characters of the Bauer family, including Pepik's young, beloved governess, Marta, business associates from Pavel's textile factory and others, start out somewhat wooden. The initial jolting sequence aside, you might be slow to connect with any of them and feel their rising concerns and confusion. (Thankfully, the present day narrator offers a plausible explanation later for some of the woodenness.)
Even so, the Bauers and their child's governess gradually develop into complex beings facing complicated times and situations, with often conflicting but very believable motivations and desires. At the same time, their eventual courage and determination seems unusual because these individuals don't initially seem capable of great or even resourceful acts. They're all in varying degrees of denial about the encroachment of the Nazi occupation of Czechoslovakia, seemingly too young or too sensitive to understand and cope with what is going on, or simply absorbed in day-to-day business and busy-ness, much of it ephemeral, trivial or distracting. In other words, the Bauers are authentically human in the face of forces beyond anyone's comprehension.
Author Alison Pick was inspired by her grandparents' own arduous five-year exodus from Czechoslovakia to Canada during World War II in constructing the story of the flight of the Bauers. She couples down to earth, propulsive description with occasional flourishes of the cinematic, all interwoven with the deft and poignant use of literal and symbolic images. Trains, which bookend both the story of the Bauers and the voice of the narrator, are a powerful case in point. Pepik's toy train set interconnects the Bauer home, is a source of both distraction and solace for him and his family, and is a reminder of his absence when his parents secure him a place on a Kindertransport, part of a series of trains used to rescue children from Nazi occupied territories to be placed with families in the United Kingdom until and if the children could be reunited with their parents after the war. Arrivals and departures on train platforms, especially Pepik's dramatic departure, are on one hand like typically dramatic movie scenes, but Pick underpins them with the earthy sights, sounds and smells of desperate, frightened human beings. Throughout, she invests images like this with both thematic potency and realistic dramatic resonance.
Other examples of pervasive, effectively used imagery include references to lost children and lost childhood, and suppressed and denied identities. Marta, in that regard, is darker and more dimensional than her callow, innocent exterior first suggests. Most wrenchingly, the Bauers struggle with revealing or suppressing their Jewish heritage or assuming different identities in order to survive.
The voice of the present-day narrator in Far To Go - wounded but resilient - is a reassuring and steadfast guide to the conclusion of this riveting story of a family torn asunder, then reassembled in a perhaps somewhat surprising fashion.
"There was not joy, exactly, in finding each other - we were too old, too set in our ways - but our pain was dulled. What we felt was not quite pleasure, but contentment. We had each finished our searching."
The voice is wary, damaged, almost resigned, but the note of contentment suggests a faith not entirely extinguished by the cruelties of history. This is a journey and a voice worth following to an unexpectedly redemptive resolution. Even the green-tinged tones of the cover convey a hopefulness that builds with a subtle momentum over the course of this absorbing book.
"I wish this were a happy story. A story to make you doubt, and despair, and then have your hopes redeemed so you could believe again, at the last minute, in the essential goodness of the world around us and the people in it. There are few things in life, though, that turn out for the best, with real happy endings."
They shouldn't. They're spoken by the world-weary but compassionate modern day narrator of a generations-old tale. The narrator leads those not stymied by that opening into the compelling story of an unusually courageous family facing increasingly troubling and demanding challenges, dilemmas, changes and decisions in the face of the start of World War II. While that might sound daunting and indeed, not a happy story as the narrator warns, it's the narrator's own unwitting warmth that will draw you in, that counterbalances the grim aspects of the unfolding story, and ultimately offers forms of hope and redemption, more than the narrator would even credit.
The Bauers, Pavel and Anneliese and their six-year-old son Pepik, are a well-off, secular Jewish family living a quiet life in a small town in the Bohemia region of western Czechoslovakia in the late 1930s. Their story begins with a jolt, as they learn of violence touching their extended family, as rumours of the growing Nazi occupation start to intrude on their comparatively idyllic existence. The characters of the Bauer family, including Pepik's young, beloved governess, Marta, business associates from Pavel's textile factory and others, start out somewhat wooden. The initial jolting sequence aside, you might be slow to connect with any of them and feel their rising concerns and confusion. (Thankfully, the present day narrator offers a plausible explanation later for some of the woodenness.)
Even so, the Bauers and their child's governess gradually develop into complex beings facing complicated times and situations, with often conflicting but very believable motivations and desires. At the same time, their eventual courage and determination seems unusual because these individuals don't initially seem capable of great or even resourceful acts. They're all in varying degrees of denial about the encroachment of the Nazi occupation of Czechoslovakia, seemingly too young or too sensitive to understand and cope with what is going on, or simply absorbed in day-to-day business and busy-ness, much of it ephemeral, trivial or distracting. In other words, the Bauers are authentically human in the face of forces beyond anyone's comprehension.
Author Alison Pick was inspired by her grandparents' own arduous five-year exodus from Czechoslovakia to Canada during World War II in constructing the story of the flight of the Bauers. She couples down to earth, propulsive description with occasional flourishes of the cinematic, all interwoven with the deft and poignant use of literal and symbolic images. Trains, which bookend both the story of the Bauers and the voice of the narrator, are a powerful case in point. Pepik's toy train set interconnects the Bauer home, is a source of both distraction and solace for him and his family, and is a reminder of his absence when his parents secure him a place on a Kindertransport, part of a series of trains used to rescue children from Nazi occupied territories to be placed with families in the United Kingdom until and if the children could be reunited with their parents after the war. Arrivals and departures on train platforms, especially Pepik's dramatic departure, are on one hand like typically dramatic movie scenes, but Pick underpins them with the earthy sights, sounds and smells of desperate, frightened human beings. Throughout, she invests images like this with both thematic potency and realistic dramatic resonance.
Other examples of pervasive, effectively used imagery include references to lost children and lost childhood, and suppressed and denied identities. Marta, in that regard, is darker and more dimensional than her callow, innocent exterior first suggests. Most wrenchingly, the Bauers struggle with revealing or suppressing their Jewish heritage or assuming different identities in order to survive.
The voice of the present-day narrator in Far To Go - wounded but resilient - is a reassuring and steadfast guide to the conclusion of this riveting story of a family torn asunder, then reassembled in a perhaps somewhat surprising fashion.
"There was not joy, exactly, in finding each other - we were too old, too set in our ways - but our pain was dulled. What we felt was not quite pleasure, but contentment. We had each finished our searching."
The voice is wary, damaged, almost resigned, but the note of contentment suggests a faith not entirely extinguished by the cruelties of history. This is a journey and a voice worth following to an unexpectedly redemptive resolution. Even the green-tinged tones of the cover convey a hopefulness that builds with a subtle momentum over the course of this absorbing book.
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