The Deadwood Beetle [Hardcover]

Mylene Dressler (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: September 6, 2001

"absorbing . . . compelling, and inventive." (Susan Vreeland, author of Girl in Hyacinth Blue)

Tristan Martens, a retired entomologist, is shaken by the discovery of his mother's sewing table in a New York antique shop. He hasn't seen it since he was a boy in Holland, but he vividly remembers the last time he did. Only Tristan knows the painful truth behind the scrawled-and misunderstood-inscription on the bottom of the table, and he embarks on a scheme to acquire it from the shop owner, Cora Lowenstein, who insists it's not for sale.

But as their lives become entangled, Tristan must make a choice. Can he tell Cora the truth? Begun in deceit, their relationship and Tristan's salvation hinge on his willingness to confront and finally confess the terrible secrets of his family's past.

In startlingly beautiful prose resonant with dramatic tension, Mylène Dressler tells the heartrending story of an old man taking his last chance and struggling toward an elusive redemption and the even more distant hope of love.

The Deadwood Beetle is a brilliant novel by a writer whose work the critics have called "lyrical" and "haunting."

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

This European-flavored novel Dressler's second, after The Medusa Tree tells, in a taut and occasionally elliptical first-person voice, the story of entomologist Tristan Martens, who has devoted his adult life to the study of beetles, the "janitors" who diligently clean up the planet's waste. An atheist, he is estranged from his only child, a troubled boy who grows up to be a gun-stockpiling member of the radical religious right, who accepts his father's Christmas checks but won't let him see his grandson. Divorced, and recently retired from a New York City university, Martens is settling into a life of isolation, despite the efforts of his last graduate student, the exuberant and enthusiastic Elida Hernandez. Then, in an antique store, he stumbles across the blackened pine sewing table that once belonged to his mother. On it is written, in childish handwriting, a Dutch inscription meaning "When the Jews are gone, we will be the next ones." To the owner of the store, the elegant Cora Lasher Lowenstein, this is a "child's warning," as "clear and honest" as the famous one made during World War II by Pastor Niem”ller. To Martens, however, the statement is both ambiguous and dangerous. The table is not for sale, but as Martens embarks on a campaign to persuade Cora to remove it from display, he finds himself on a journey into his childhood during the Nazi occupation. Along the way, Martens begins to learn how to deal with the detritus of personal and political life, which human beings cannot dispose of as cleanly and neatly as beetles dispose of organic leftovers. European world-weariness mingles with American optimism in this accomplished novel, dense with the scrap material of the past. Brilliance Audio.

Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal

While ultimately a tale of Holocaust guilt, Dressler's second novel (after The Medusa Tree) focuses on an aging Dutch immigrant to New York, a retired professor of entomology whose father was a Nazi collaborator and sister a suicide. By chance, Tristan Martens comes across his mother's sewing table in an antique store, recognizing it because of an ambiguous, possibly anti-Semitic quotation he scratched into the underside. This encounter with his past leads to a friendship with the store's owner, whose Jewish husband lies in a vegetative state in a nursing home. Love blossoms slowly between them until, miraculously, the husband awakens from his coma a seeming vengeance against the guilt-ridden professor and the potential of love is snapped. Throughout, Martens's former graduate student helps him to maintain some intellectual enthusiasm with her exciting discoveries of a new beetle behavior discoveries that relate metaphorically to the story itself. Mostly a character study (the slim plot is not an aesthetic device), Dressler's earnest and finely crafted work has all the necessary pieces but as a whole lacks verve. Nevertheless, it is a worthy addition to the burgeoning field of literature of the Holocaust. Harold Augenbraum, Mercantile Lib. of New York
Copyright 2001 Reed Business Information, Inc.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Reading level: Ages 14 and up
  
• Hardcover: 208 pages
• Publisher: Blue Hen; First edition. edition (September 6, 2001)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0399148051
• ISBN-13: 978-0399148057
• Product Dimensions: 8.2 x 5.5 x 0.7 inches
• Shipping Weight: 14.4 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 4.7 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (10 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #3,292,093 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

It's a lovely day as I look out toward the mountains: I'm feeling renewed, and hope this post finds you peaceful, happy and upward-looking as well. I like to keep these profiles and updates short and to the point--but I do have some nice news to share, with my warmest thanks, as always, for inviting me so kindly into your lives:

My fourth novel, The Wedding of Anna F., is progressing nicely through its final draft. Godspeed, little Anna!

My latest blog, AMERICAN STORIES NOW, has gone live, and will be running with new posts throughout the end of the year. I hope you'll stop by and visit www.americanstoriesnow.blogspot.com. Your comments and thoughts are always welcome. Writers and students: if you'd like to submit a story to the blog, please contact me for submission guidelines.

And finally, I am busy preparing my new speaking tour, "The Art of Inspiration in Challenging Times." As those of you who have seen my talks or attended my workshops know, one of my passions in life is helping us inspire one another, immediately and memorably, through words, voice, movement and action. Connecting with an audience or a single human being, engaging and bonding through language and story, inspiring others to think, change, hope, dream and imagine--such skills blossom not only in authors, professors, actors, dancers or artists. The art of inspiration belongs to each and every one of us. If you would like to learn more about the talk, or schedule an appearance at your school, business, or non-profit, please send an email to [e-mail].

As always, my friends, you can reach me via my website at www.mylenedressler.com or www.doctoremspeaks.com; join me on Twitter (www.twitter.com/mylenedressler); or friend me on Facebook.

All my best to you!
Em

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

17 of 19 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Compelling, heartfelt fiction, September 11, 2001

By 

Debbie Lee Wesselmann (the Lehigh Valley, PA) - See all my reviews
(TOP 50 REVIEWER)    (VINE VOICE)    (2008 HOLIDAY TEAM)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The Deadwood Beetle (Hardcover)

This wise and gorgeously wrought novel had me by the heart from its first sentence. Tristan Martens, a retired entomologist in his seventies, has discovered by accident the blackened pine sewing table once owned by his mother in the Nazi occupied Netherlands. As he recognizes it in the New York antique shop - "this ghost, this small, lost thing, floating like a piece of impossible wreckage toward me" - he knows he must possess it to keep its secret from the world. The owner Cora Lowenstein, who has misinterpreted the childlike scrawl on the table's underside, stands in his way. The table is not for sale. And so Tristan begins to scheme in his careful but ultimately clumsy way to persuade her otherwise.

Dressler is a skilled novelist with a flair for language and storytelling. The voice of Tristan is so authentic and honest that I can't imagine any reader emerging from this tale without a deep affection for him. As he struggles with guilt, his grown and unyielding son, the stirrings of love, and his mortality, we come to understand that a seemingly simple life is not necessarily so. His last graduate student Elida periodically bursts into his apartment, urging him to leave his boxes of dead beetles to get out more, but we already know Tristan has done and seen more than she has (though Elida, too, has her demons.)

THE DEADWOOD BEETLE is one of those books that lingers in the imagination long after its reading. You won't regret a minute spent with this author and her extraordinary novel.

7 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars AN UNEQUIVOCAL RECOMMENDATION!, November 6, 2001

By 

Laurel Doud (prather, CA United States) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Deadwood Beetle (Hardcover)

The Deadwood Beetle is a beautifully written work. There are so many things to love about it, but I was truly impressed with the pacing of the story. The opening story is linear, but Dressler interweaves stories from the past that aren't told chronologically. A less-skilled writer would either not attempt this at all or bungle it badly. Dressler does neither. The stories float, intermingled, above the linear tale but there is no confusion. It works and works wonderfully. I have read The Deadwood Beetle, listened to it on tape with my Books-On-Tape bookclub, and bought it in large print for my father. An unequivocal recommendation!

6 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Intriguing!, March 4, 2003

By 

John P. Rooney "John" (Massachusetts) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The Deadwood Beetle (Mass Market Paperback)

"The Deadwood Beetle" by Mylene Dressler, G. K. Hall & Co., 2001, Large Type Book.

At first, this book appears to be about a little Dutch boy who survived the Holocaust, and, years later spies his mother's sewing table in an antiques store. The store owner, Cora Lowenstein, translates the child's inscription, on the bottom of the table, without knowing that it was Tristan Martens, himself, who carved it there years ago. Her version in English is "When the Jews are gone, we will be the next ones", which she interprets as in the same fashion as the famous quote from Pastor Niemoeller, (1892-1984).

It seems, however, that was not the meaning of the carved words: Tristan Martens (who now had to be in his late sixties or early seventies) knew it was from his Dutch father, who was a Nazi. Tristan was not a victim of the holocaust; instead, his family was waiting for their turn in power, after the Jews were gone. Angry Dutch citizens had looted his mother's table from their Dutch home when The Netherlands was liberated. He feels guilty for most of his life. This central theme of guilt is always a background plot as Tristan begins to see Cora Lowenstein in a romantic light. The guilt theme is intertwined, somewhat, with entomology, as he deals with his last graduate student, who, in turn, is dealing with a unique form of insect out in Arizona. Tristan Martens tells the student's parents how he happened to be an immigrant (as they were) and some of the story of his life directly after the World War.

Except for flashbacks to his life in The Netherlands, the book is set mainly in winter-time New York City, with some trips to a nursing home in nearby Connecticut. I think that the author, Dressler, has done a good job in capturing the flavor of subways and travel in New York. She has written an intriguing book.