Customer Reviews

Awake in the Dark: Stories

5 star:		(16)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

Beautifully written. It took my breath away. I couldn't put the book down. I love the stories, I immersed myself in all the characters, I wanted to know more. I felt the character's sorrow and desire to learn about their past. These stories will stay with me forever.

Haunting, painful, beautiful and frightening. I read this book in two hours, devouring the words like a starved person at a feast. I was totally immersed in the stories, lost to the world around me. I have rarely read a book that stayed with me so strongly long after I had finished reading it.

Tales of terrible times, told economically and without appealling to tears - and this dry, rough way of telling episodes that happened gives them more impact. I really liked it.

This book will not leave you indifferent. It will stir very strong emotions deep inside you and will send a shock wave through your being. Populated with extremely powerful images, these stories will stay with you forever. The elegant language and masterful use of suspense contribute equally to the power of these stories.

In Awake in the Dark, Nayman has taken a tragic subject and crafted from it stories that are at once painful and full of light and compassion. It is a journey through the Uncanny in the truest sense. Nayman manages not only to make the familiar strange - a lamp can be a corpse, a wall can be a coffin - but going a step further she makes the strange familiar - strangers can be siblings, a Nazi can be one's mother.

Though each story is about a different character, the stories thematically weave in and out of one another and build a fabric. Each character's moment of unmasking or reclaiming a part of their identity seems to be another step in the last character's process of self-discovery. The only other book I've read in which the sense of deep shared history is so tangible is Marquez' 100 Years of Solitude. This feeling of connectedness makes each vignette better than the last and emphasizes one of the overarching themes of the book: redemption through sharing and owning one's history.

Awake in the Dark is piercing, poignant and strikingly original and I highly recommend it.

In "Awake in the Dark" past lives shrouded in silence are revealed, hidden identities are uncovered bit by bit, and truths emerge from tales.
In these four stories, secrets are unearthed from a long-forgotten locket, from a framed photograph, from a deathbed letter, from an attic trunk.
Shira Nayman takes us to dark corners of the mind, the heart, and the soul to discover both the unspeakable and the wondrous.

How do descendents of Holocaust victims and perpetrators come to terms with the unthinkable atrocities that their ancestors witnesssed, experienced, and sometimes inflicted? In Shira Nayman's emotionally rich and psychologically brilliant stories, her heroines stumble upon, often at great psychic peril, the truth about the enormous suffering their relatives endured or, in some cases, caused.

There is breathtaking urgency in these stories in keeping with the best of psychological thrillers. As if this were not enough, Ms. Nayman writes with such poetic grace and visceral intelligence that the reader knows herself to be in the hands of a literary talent of the highest order.

Ms. Nayman's intrepid characters, compelled to seek the most awful of truths, are literary descendents of Oedipus, Electra, Antigone, Hamlet, and Lear, whose terrifying struggle between blindness and insight give them tragic and univeral dimension.

I have never written a review before, but I can't overstate how powerful these stories are. Each of them made me think about the meaning of identity, of family history. I took the book out of the library, and was so moved by it that I had to go buy it -- I need this book on my own bookshelf! Read it -- but be prepared to stay up late to grab every bit of it!

I have my own family history that is very similar to some of the stories...They touch you very deeply on so many levels. You will not be able to put this book down!

Moving, made me think about the secrets (skeletons) in my own family's closets. It speaks to anyone from a background where secrets caused pain. Isn't that everyone? Left me feeling inspired. The characters in this book shine with a love of life. And the will to go on and make lives for themselves. One message: that history doesn't have to defeat us.