Breath and Shadows (Ballantine Reader's Circle) [Paperback]

Ella Leffland (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: June 6, 2000 | Series: Ballantine Reader's Circle

Ella Leffland brilliantly explores the perils of ordinary life that threaten the well-being, even the sanity, of one member of each of three generations of a Danish family in Europe and America -- people who are daring enough to believe that goodness and truth are possible in worlds they cannot control.

--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

In Howard's End, E.M. Forster exhorts his readers to "only connect." In Breath and Shadows, Ella Leffland shows us how difficult that is to do. All of the characters in her elusive and exquisite fourth novel are connected, though none of them knows how truly intimate those bonds are. Spanning three centuries in the history of one family, Leffland presents us with three major characters: Thorkild the Counselor, a Danish dwarf already approaching the end of his life in the early 1800s; his great-granddaughter, Grethe Rosted, a young wife and mother living outside of Copenhagen in the 1880s; and Paula, their modern-day descendant, born in Illinois but living in Switzerland. Rather than organizing this generational tale chronologically, Leffland chooses to move back and forth between life stories, emphasizing for the reader a connectedness that the protagonists can only dimly understand. Grethe, for example, was orphaned at an early age and raised by relatives. She knows nothing about Thorkild and only a little about her grandfather, Thorkild's son, who escaped death as a child only to meet it on the battlefields in Napoleon's army. Wandering in her garden one day she muses:

If her grandfather had fallen a hairsbreadth differently, he would have perished on the fence spike, a child of tender age, without issue, a child with a child's seed dead before its journey. But for that millimeter her father would not have been born, she in turn would not have been born. Nothing. An eternal void.

Grethe understands that it is "only by the grace of a millimeter" that she is alive; she cannot know that her own grandchild will not even know that much about her. For Paula, just 10 months old when her mother left her father (Grethe's son), grew up never even knowing his name. It is for the reader to make those links that the characters never can: a grieving man's beloved only son becomes, in time, merely an anonymous paper silhouette on his great-granddaughter's wall; a young boy's "magic carpet" is barely rescued from the scrap heap 50 years later by an unknown daughter who will appreciate its beauty without ever understanding its significance. And with each succeeding generation still more will be lost until, at last, the only evidence of one's existence will lie solely in the genes. And yet Leffland's book is anything but depressing; we may all be "but breath and shadow, nothing more," but the fact that we choose to live at all in the face of oblivion is cause for celebration. --Alix Wilber --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From Publishers Weekly

The breadth and seriousness of Leffland's imagination has been evident in her four previous novels (most recently, The Knight, Death and the Devil), none of which resembles the other, and each of which combines formidable narrative gifts with a fidelity to background and to human nature. Here, the fragile beacon of moral integrity defies an enigmatic hereditary gloom and illuminates a richly imagined story of three generations of a Danish family over two centuries. Thorkild, born a dwarf and now a widowed financial adviser living in early 19th century Copenhagen, has been tormented by shame over his handicap all his life. When his beloved son and only child is killed in the battle of Leipzig, he gradually grows unhinged with grief, and his sister commits him to a mental institution. This tragic legacy becomes an unhealthy fixation for Thorkild's granddaughter, Grethe Rosted, the novel's second character, a happily married mother of two residing on the Northern Danish coast in the 1880s. Despite her pleasant life as a member of the liberal bourgeois circles then revolutionizing Scandinavian culture, Grethe slowly goes mad and devastates her family in one terrible, irreversible act. Paula, a middle-aged American woman living in present-day Switzerland, is the novel's third character and the granddaughter that Grethe never knew. She has fled a staid existence as the wife of a Swiss attorney to sculpt in a remote village in the Jura mountains, where she ponders the same painful questions that, unknown to her, anguished her ancestors: "It was as if God, if one believed in God, had forgotten to finish His task when He created human beings, had left out some essential, some terribly needed ingredient." Though the plot's complex genealogy is at times hard to follow, and the callousness and cruelty of some of the characters sometimes contrasts too neatly with the gentleness of those they harm, the theme resonates powerfully nonetheless. Leffland's graceful, poetic prose and her ability to create indelibly vivid settings (from a small hut in the Jura mountains to the bustle of 18th-century Copenhagen) is dazzling. Her intelligent, unsentimental assessment of the harshness that coexists with the beauty of life is beautifully conveyed through this clan's family inheritance of passion and disenchantment. Agent: Lois Wallace.
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 336 pages
• Publisher: Ballantine Books; First Edition, First Printing edition (June 6, 2000)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0345439236
• ISBN-13: 978-0345439239
• Product Dimensions: 5.5 x 0.7 x 8.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 11.5 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 4.1 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (9 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,555,346 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

11 of 11 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars some things you will never know, March 4, 2003

By 

"mr_fishscales" (Rochester, New York) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Breath and Shadows (Ballantine Reader's Circle) (Paperback)

I confess that I am awarding this novel 5 stars in part to counter some of the low ratings given to the book by other customer reviewers.
I was not put off in the least by the three-part structure. Every third chapter is about the same generation. The generations are presented in chronological order and each block of three chapters is prefaced by brief description of the interior of cave, the significance of which is made explicit at the end of the novel. There is absolutely nothing confusing, puzzling or arbitrary about any of this. Quite the opposite: it makes the unfolding of the plot(s) more dramatic and drives home the theme of the novel, which is a meditation on the difficulty of finding truth in your life.

The recent movie "The Hours", based on a Michael Cunningham novel that I have not read, uses much the same technique, but is focussed on a different theme and the geneaological relationships among the characters are not as extensive. Each group of characters in the Leffland novel are members of the same family, one separated from the other by two or three generations. Leffland is quite good at making connections among the generations, some of the physical, such as the flowered rug made by Grete Rosted that has talismanic significance for Paula, although she never finds out that her own grandmother made it. Some of the connections are metaphysical, such as the compulsion to travel extemporaneously shared by Thorkild, his grandson and Philip. She is also quite good about showing us the hazy boundary between the memories of old people and the written historical record. And the varying reliability of both.

Leffland is an excellent plotter. The narratives are each compelling in their own right and while some threads are tied together at the end, the author has the art and good taste to leave some hanging, allowing the reader to imagine, for example the grimness of Thorkild's end. She uses a trick of switching to the present tense at the beginning and ends of each chapter, which makes the action quite immediate and has the effect of repeatedly building a bridge between the generations. One can almost sense the author's growing excitement and engagement as the book progresses. The prose of the initial chapters is a bit halting and the chapters are short. But as the novel progresses, the prose grows more fluid and the chapters stretch out to accomodate the sprawling plot.

If the book has a weakness, it is the failure to bring the theme into more focus. The Rosteds are not world beaters. They are intelligent members of the aristocracy in the nineteenth century and of the upper middle class in the twentieth century, but they are not geniuses or great in any sense. Therefore their struggle to find truth in their lives is constantly doomed to less than complete success. Thorkild wrestles with life's verities in his endless writings, which he eventually burns. Holger and Grethe throw Bohemian parties and Holger paints, but only as a gentleman painter. Paula is a sculptor of no discernible talent and Philip deserted his creative side while still in college and became a businessman.

So no one in this novel ever has a sort of 'aha' moment. Rather they all fail to discover the whole truth and must learn to settle for that. While this is the situation that most of us find ourselves in, I thought that perhaps Leffland could have limned the theme a little more clearly. However, it is quite possible that I simply need to read the book again. It is a great temptation in the last third of the novel to read very quickly as many of the climaxes approach. I may well have missed some of the art in order to know the end of a sad and beautiful story.

8 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Weaving Order out of Chaos, April 16, 2000

By 

Karen Finell (Santa Barbara, CA USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Breath and Shadows (Hardcover)

The nine year wait for Ella Leffland's new novel has been worth its while. This three generations saga of a Danish family is at once unique and mesmerizing. "Take care!" Is the opening line. The words warn the reader--as much as the child clutching the cat, Olaf--to take care! Read this book with care! Nothing is quite what it seems. The leitmotif of the novel is finding continuity, permanence within this world of impermanence. The heroine, Grethe, muses that everything in life is fleeting, all goes somewhere, but where? The existential question of what will survive when we are gone, is repeated throughout this novel. Leffland's novel is provocative and sad, and at the same time strangely uplifting. There is rain and fog, ice and sleet, but there are also midsummer-nights and a plethora of flowers, "...Golden chains and bursts of fiery reds and lakes of blue, of violet, of sparkling white. ...Blooms bursting up everywhere." A little later Grethe thinks with a foreboding pensiveness, that "...these same blooms will only flake and shred and in their seeding decay give rise to more of the same." Leffland weaves order out of chaotic lives spanning three centuries, and leaves the reader to marvel at her ability to braid darkness with light. Sophocles' thought, "Man is but breath and shadow, nothing more," has given rise to Ella Leffland's finest book.

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Life's but a walking shadow..., June 16, 1999

By A Customer

This review is from: Breath and Shadows (Hardcover)

Have you ever looked out an airplane window and wondered what was going on in the lives of those below? In this novel, the world is vast, and our connections in it unpredictable and fleeting. Due to a combination of eccentricity, pride, and political change, three generations of one Danish family live isolated from each other, yet theirs is in a way a noble family line, one of fine feeling, and the characters might have found great comfort in their shared history, had they known it. The patriarch, Thorkild, is one of the more brilliantly-conceived, and heartbreaking, characters in my memory. A melancholy read, but highly recommended.