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10 of 10 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Best I've Read in a Long Time, March 15, 2004
By A Customer
This review is from: Confinement (Shannon Ravenel Books) (Hardcover)
Like most of Carrie Brown's work, this one radiates with beauty -- the beauty of language and of a great story. Where she has outdone herself is in the emotional effect of the novel. I frankly wasn't prepared to love this book, and indeed felt a little impatient in the first 1/2 chapter or so. But Brown masterfully interweaves not only the characters' lives and circumstances, but also all the different kinds and consequences of love and sacrifice. It's this trait that sets it apart. There are no cheap thrills or manufactured emotions here... nothing contrived. Brown respects her readers, and it shows. Rather, this novel and its characters step quietly into the reader's life, as if they'd been waiting for our attention all along. They spin their wonderful story, and ask only for us to watch and listen. Believe me, it's enough.
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8 of 8 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
"We are all alone in the end.", March 31, 2004
This review is from: Confinement (Shannon Ravenel Books) (Hardcover)
Longing, loss and suffering are the themes of Confinement, a gorgeously written and emotionally charged novel by Carrie Brown. I couldn't put this book down. This is a beautiful story, which brims over with passion and symbolism, as Brown melodiously recounts the complex and tortured life of Arthur Henning, a rather cloistered and resolute Jewish man - a refugee from Nazi Austria - who, together with his young son Toby, starts a new life as a chauffeur in America at a country estate, the home of the Duvall family. As his life in America settles, he watches Toby grow up along side the Duvalls' daughter Aggie. When Aggie falls pregnant, Mr. Duvall orders Arthur to drive her to Breakabeen, a home for unwed mothers. Arthur is shocked at the way her parents treat Aggie and when he learns of their decision to put the baby up for adoption he wants to save Agatha. Consequently, he begins to fall in love with her. The confinement of the title is the confinement of the soul, as Arthur, a lonely man who is hiding from his past, seems unable to reclaim his life. His relationship with Aggie, however, releases him from his emotional slumber. For Arthur, Aggie is also a victim of persecution and confinement. Someone has taken advantage of her - her kindness, her humour and the decency that stood in her character. And his desire for her "becomes a boulder" which he cannot see around. Twenty years of his life in America seems to him a "sorry, shabby thing" and although he has been forced to reinvent himself, his sudden attraction to Aggie makes him question the type of man he has become. His first winter in America is a private epilogue to the war, "a final, quite chapter in which nothing has happened and every loss will be felt over again." He remembers his wife Anna, and their baby, killed in the London blitz. And he is haunted by images of his friend, pianist and surgeon Dr Ornstein, sitting in his coffee shop just before he was brutally assaulted by the SS. He's obsessed by these ghostly images from the past, living a cloistered life in the United States, while also lamenting his Jewish faith, which "drifts life a river without banks to guide it", forever extinguished in the face of war. Brown is a gifted stylist, whose prose is meticulously whittled and surefooted. Her powers of description are formidable - Arthur wants his own past to be erased, "to shiver and break up like water fleeing through his fingers." Confinement is narrated in a generous, patient, and intelligent voice, and the author almost presents the subject matter from the perspective of an insider, clear eyed and without sentimentality. This is a fine novel, about a man who feels he has lost everything, and who stands empty handed, but who, in the end achieves redemption. Mike Leonard March 04
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3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
A painful transition, February 20, 2005
This review is from: Confinement (Shannon Ravenel Books) (Hardcover)
Arthur Henning comes to America after fleeing his native country, but loses his wife and baby daughter to the London Blitz. Nevertheless he remains hopeful, carrying his young son, Toby, and a battered suitcase to the United States, where it has been arranged for him to work as a driver for the wealthy Duvall's.
Arthur's inner struggles are complicated by a recurring memory, an event he witnessed at the hands of the Nazi storm troopers, the brutal beating of a surgeon as bystanders watch, helpless to intervene. A lingering remnant of a disturbing past that tortures his mind, Arthur can never forget the nightmare of being Jewish in Hitler's Germany.
Scarred before he ever sets foot in his new country, Arthur is hopeful, living a precise and guarded life devoid of complications, his spirit humbled by the loss of joy. The years pass and Toby grows up in his father's shadow, witnesses to the excesses of the Duvall's, a prosperity they will never enjoy. Agatha, the Duvall's daughter, a year younger than Toby, is frequently left in Arthur's care when her mother is indisposed.
When a dismayed Arthur is ordered to deliver a pregnant Aggie to a home for unwed mothers, the humble Arthur is stunned by the Duvall's curt dismissal of their daughter; he makes it his personal mission to keep track of the baby, a boy, given up for adoption. Then he loses track of the adoptive family, thrown once more into despair, especially when Toby leaves home without a word. Years later, while driving through a familiar neighborhood, Arthur sees the child again, an experience that marks a new beginning, an opening of Arthur's long-stifled heart. Through the abiding friendship of Agatha, Arthur finds his way back to contentment.
This is a story born of the loss of country and kin, the loss of a child and finally a grandchild. Bridging Hitler's Europe and the American dream as lived from the outside, looking in, Arthur eventually disentangles from the manacles of his own history, finding redemption in the unknowable future, one defined by a newly awakened personal freedom. What might have been an engaging novel, crumbles under the burden of weighty prose. The author's use of description is better than average, but consistently overwrought, making it difficult to separate one element from the story, or one time frame from another. All in all, this is an ambitious effort by the author of The Hatbox Baby, another novel that never quite reaches its potential. Luan Gaines/2005.
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