Customer Reviews

Fault Lines

5 star:		(19)
4 star:		(17)
3 star:		(11)
2 star:		(10)
1 star:		(3)

 

 

I grew up a child in Nazi Germany, therefore perhaps look at this novel with a more critical eye. After the first few pages bored me, and the little protagonist Sol disgusted me, I came across the word, Lebensborn, and curious, I read on. (for more information on the subject, go to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lebensborn)

I sadly could not connect. I found Huston's description of children unnatural, while some of their childish thoughts struck me as real. There is a contradiction in her writing that makes for arduous reading. Yet, sprinkled through the pages are passages of lyrical and magical prose. The last two segments of Sadie and then Krystina-Erra flowed better and the characters were driven by love. Love is an important ingredient in any book. It seems to me that the writer, despite her many prizes, had missed out on doing research. Her editors must be blamed as well. It is a novel, fiction, but since it deals with an important period of history, it should be accurate and researched. Examples: No one drank hot chocolate in the spring of 1945 (chocolate in any shape had not been available for years), no one had a big fat hunk of pork-bone to eat, the weather was not icy cold as January tends to be, but in 1945 it happened to be one of the warmest Januaries, however, Huston describes it as bitter-cold. After the bombing raid on Dresden, the worst on the 13th and subsequent one on the 14th of February, not as she limits the raid to Valentine's Day--when approximately 100,000 - 300,000 people died--the weather was like spring. My father's family camped out--safe from bombs in Dresden--in the open hills, since the weather was so warm. The Americans entered Saxony in April, not in June, and withdrew in July, ceding this part of Germany to the Russians. The Ukraine was already part of the Soviet union before WW II, in fact the Russians had starved many of the peasants there in order to achieve greater dominance and were hated. The Germans were looked upon as liberators, until disillusionment set in when they treated them as inferior Slavs. There were many blonds in the Ukraine, tracing their bloodlines back to Vikings. Sending blond children to Germany if the parents had been killed might be accurate, but this is not what Huston writes. The dirty conditions the children were kept in is contrary to what the Nazis tried to achieve, namely, healthy Aryan children, who would be superior in looks and health. They would have been treated and fed well, perhaps not coddled, but not beaten either. Huston writes fiction, but if a writer deals with history he/she should at least be accurate. There are enough real horrors the Nazis committed, without exaggerating or making up new ones that are untrue.

This book definitely got better as I got into it; in fact, I almost put it down during the first chapter. A six year old with a mind like Sol's is very disturbing and not even realistic. However, as the stories of the father and grandmothers were told, I found myself hooked.

War is messy and creates messy situations, events and families. I have never read about the Germanization of stolen children under the Nazis. This provides a fascinating read to anyone interested in stories of WWII; however, I must agree with some of the reviewers who pointed out the lack of connection with the characters. I did immediately go back to the first and reread parts that took on much more significance after I knew the ending.

Perhaps this story also demonstrates the profound effect mothers have on their children even when they aren't a part of their lives. I found this book interesting, readable, and thought provoking. I just wish I would have liked these people a bit better, but maybe that's the point: each generation was doomed to carry the baggage accumulated by those that came before them.

I won't describe the plot since so many others have done that.

First, I would advise reading it from back to front, reversing the order in which it was written so that you end up hearing the story in chronological order, not reverse chronology (going further back in time with each of the four sections). There was no advantage (or art) to doing it that way, and you didn't know as you read what might be important as you got further into the book (what happened to certain characters).

The children were utterly unbelievable and on the whole, the characters, including the children, were unlikable. Please, give me a character or two I can like!

Even more troubling for me (as a history major) was the author's ignorance of the periods she was writing about. For example, I personally find it hard to believe that a German facility during World War II bent on teaching Polish children to be German children would teach them to sing "Jingle Bells"! Aside from it not being a German carol (and there are lots of German Christmas carols), raising the question of whether they were trying to teach the children to be German or American, during a war people are unlikely to sing their enemy's songs!

Other mistakes had to do with the child in Toronto in 1962 (a year in which I was a child in the US). Six year olds (then or now) do not learn ballet wearing uncomfortable "pointe" shoes -- no way. They wear (wore) leather slippers -- aside from en pointe dancing damaging the feet of small children, their feet simply aren't strong enough yet to dance en pointe.

Brownies do not earn badges, and even when they get older, the badges are not given to the best in a competition -- they simply represent achievements of mastering skills.

Garter belts were not used by 6-year-olds to hold up woolen socks, but by older females to hold up nylons. A 6 year old would have worn tights or knee socks.

A 6 year old child who initially thinks people speaking Yiddish are in fact speaking German (a language she likely has never heard) would not then have to ask her mother -- speaking German to an old friend -- what language they were speaking, would she?

Finally, old childhood friends who meet up again after many years are unlikely to immediately begin having sex -- one assumes that the childhood relationship was not sexual, after all.

These things may not bother others, but I kept thinking "This book is so ridiculous -- how did this woman get away with so little fact checking?" The result was I took with a grain of salt everything she said about the central theme -- a program whereby Germans took Polish children (or children from other conquered areas) from their parents and placed them with German homes. Much she said about this is suspect, in my opinion (shipping Polish children, taken from their parents, to death camps, for example).

Finally, the author never addresses the question of whether taking children from the only home they've known (the German homes) is almost as bad as the Germans taking the children from their original homes, particularly when the children are going not to relatives or parents, but to non-German adoptive parents. In retrospect, we ought to be able to raise the moral issues involved on what should have happened. In fact (which the author apparently didn't know), many of the children were already orphans when recruited into the Germanization program (there was a nasty war going on, after all).

The style is easy to read (unusual for a translation). It made pretty good airplane reading: I bought this at a Canadian airport (Canadian author!) with my last Canadian dollars, but I probably should have given the money to charity instead.

I would not recommend paying seventeen Canadian dollars for this book! And if you care about getting the details right, you'll probably find this book as annoyingly sloppy as I did.

This book is written in a very interesting style: four different sections allow you to experience four generations of a family, each character when they were age six. Through the four separate stories, you see how each generation has formed the one that comes after it.

It starts with the youngest, a very spoiled and self-absorbed child, Sol, whose mother dotes on him and has taught him to believe that he is destined for greatness and is pretty much the center of the universe. We are also introduced to the other generations; his father Randall, grandmother Sadie, and great-grandmother Erra. Because of the unique format of the book, we form opinions of each character by seeing their interaction with the generations before and after them, but only by later reading about their own 6th year of life can we understand why they are the way they are.

Although I was sometimes a little confused by the "backwards" storytelling and had to flip toward the front of the book to re-read some parts, I liked the concept and thought it was much more interesting than if the story line had gone from Erra in 1944 to Sol in 2004. The characters still had the same strengths and weaknesses, but the hidden history was much more powerful than a "straight" novel would have been.

Recommended.

The author uses an interesting narrative technique, of backwards storytelling crossing 4 generations. Each is told from the perspective of a six-year-old, starting with Sol (2004), his father Randall (1982), his grandmother Sadie (1962) and his great-great grandmother Kristina (1944-45). The story is mostly about Erra=Kristina=GG (great-grandmother), and the impetus is Sadie's digging and discoveries into her mother's origins. She is the main character, and the story might have been possible being viewed only through Sadie as narrator, and later Kristina's childhood narration.

Four generations are tied together by a birthmark. Each has determined it's mark as a secret or a shame, a magical friend, or simply a nuisance. Sol is the first narrator, he is an extremely disturbing and prococious child who has false Messianic notions, as well as sick and perverse fantasies. His parents are typical caricatures, and provide for many comical moments as they try to childproof his entire world, while unbeknownst to them, he is developing into a psychological sicko. Anyway, the story gets interesting when Grandma Sadie decides on a family visit to Munich Germany and a reunion of her mother Erra=Kristina with her sister Greta. So self-centered Sol thankfully fades to the background.

Randall's story gets more interesting because you see more of what drives Sadie to find out the facts, her obsession with family history, and Nazism, her "Jewishness" as atonement for her suspected inherited guilt. And the contrast of her orthodoxy with the liberal views of her husband Aron.

It is in Sadie's story that you understand the pain, and the confusion, of a child who does not know who she is and where she comes from. She bonds with Peter Silbermann, one of her mother's husbands, and feels a sense of belonging when he takes her to Katz's every Sunday. As Sadie Silbermann she actually got to talk to kids in school and was accepted by them. Yet her life is thrown apart when witnessing a lurid and unnecessary scene between her mother and a stranger resulting in the loss her stepfather Peter and a realization that there is a dark evil mystery in her mother's origins. From this background Sadie becomes an activist historian, and devotes her life to research into Nazism, the displaced people from the Aryanization programs, and finally brings her mother face to face with the sister she grew up with and the past she strove to forget. Finally, Kristina's story is poignant and also the most childlike. It provides a fitting ending to the saga.

Although I enjoyed the story, and the tracing of Kristina's story to the home she grew up in, and the secret (which is not such a secret, and easily figured out), I thought the choice of six-year-old narrators disturbing for the loss of innocence and adult content that was attributed to them. Perhaps a cynical teen would have been more appropriate. In any case, if you enjoyed this book, you'd like The Book Thief which is about a young girl growing up in the same period of time in Germany. Death is the narrator and used very effectively there.

This book had an interesting premise and structure, but it seems that some of the more interesting parts of the story fell in the gaps between sections. Really, the book's downfall lay in the characters. I can't think of a book with more unlikable and unrealistic characters. I didn't even know that books could make six-year-olds unlikable. As for unrealistic, these four "six"-year-olds were so grown up that rather being precocious, they were ridiculous.
The book starts off with the most unlikable of the four, Sol. I am fairly certain that the Hitler himself was a more pleasant six-year-old than the megalomaniac masturbator Sol.
That being said, there were some entertaining parts of the book, but all in all it was simply too unrealistic to enjoy. There were factual errors as well as some translation mistakes. I really wouldn't recommend this to anyone.

FAULT LINES is such an interesting novel technically, and so engaging on the page-by-page level, that the question of whether it all hangs together seems almost irrelevant. Each of the four parts of the book has a different narrator, all of whom are six years old at the time of telling. We start in 2004 with Sol, a precocious superkid in California. Then back to 1982 with his father Randall, in New York and Haifa. Then Randall's mother Sadie in Toronto in 1962, and finally to Sol's great-grandmother Erra in Germany in 1944. There is a secret behind this family tree, that readers with a knowledge of the byways of 20th-century history will probably guess long before it is revealed. But Huston is as clever with misdirection as she is with revelation, and while many details of what later happens to the family turn out to be unrelated to this central secret, they all form an ironic commentary on the complexity of mixed bloodlines in the American postwar era.

The brilliance of the book is the use of the six-year-old narrators. Children this young see more than their parents think, but they cannot place what they discover within an understanding of its adult context. So the entire book is a sequence of explorations pushing backwards one generation at a time. This is fascinating, and there are a lot of wonderful discoveries along the way, especially about the beliefs, affections, envies, and experiences that both knit a family together and break it apart. Tone is another matter. Occasionally, the child's voice breaks into a poetry that is clearly that of the author, as in the opening of the fourth section: "A scattering of ecstasies. Amaze me, I say to the world. Whirl me, thrill me, stun me, never stop." This scintillates even more in the author's original French, which may help explain why the book was such a success over there. But for the most part, the voice has a more obvious connection to childhood; this is Sol in 2004: "Fortunately God and President Bush are buddies. I think of heaven as one big Texas in the sky, with God rambling around in a cowboy hat and boots and checking to make sure everything's in order on his ranch. Taking an occasional pot shot at a planet for the fun of it." Politics aside, this is precocious, as I say. But not so much as Sol's reactions to the sadistic images he finds on the internet; the persistent thread of violence and age-inappropriate sexuality will disturb many readers.

Read to the end, and you will find that the damage to Sol's psyche is only an extreme form of an underlying disturbance expressed more subtly in the other characters, but going back seventy years -- the fault lines of the title. None of the others is quite so weird, and there are many beauties along the way, including some fabulous descriptions of music (Erra is a singer). But I think you are meant to understand that all the family problems -- their phobias, their paranoias, their battles over religion -- stem from that one terrible event in the past. Nancy Huston involves us in a fascinating saga told from an unusual perspective, but I am not sure that she succeeds in proving her central point. (4.5 stars)

I rarely read fiction; this book helps confirm why. Like other reviewers, I almost put the book down after the first segment. It is narrated by a disturbingly precocious six year old. Each ensuing segment is narrated by a connecting family member, going back in time to when they were six years old. The reader is supposed to connect the dots as to how/why their personalities were formed, and somehow, a mysterious birthmark intertwines them all. None of these "children" spoke or acted like a typical six year old--do you know any that use the word "relentless?" The author used it in their vocabularies relentlessly. If the author had really used terminology and thought processes of a six year old, she would have put readers to sleep. Instead, we get six year olds who act and talk like 36 year olds. I kept reading to find out what caused Sol, the first child in this story, to be such a deviated and dangerous boy. You'll never know--the author never does connect that dot. This is a titillating piece of fluff, based loosely on history.

This is a heartbreaking story handed back from one child to the next. Children see everything and make sense of so little, even such precocious, gifted children as Sol, Randall, Sadie and Kristina.

The first section is Sol's, and it's the most difficult to read. Part of this is stylistic, the particular way in which Sol's voice works, and part of has to do with content. Sol is immersed in the peculiar ugliness of the information age. War is, to Sol, a remote collection of perversely exciting images, as he eroticizes his own fears of the world around him. I agree with other reviewers that this is disturbing, but I fear it is accurate.

His father Randall's childhood time in Israel is next. War is not far from his family, but even war is overshadowed by household strife and catastrophe, young love and unavoidable loss. Next is Randall's mother Sadie's tale, and this is perhaps the best section, as she grows up understanding absolutely nothing about where she comes from, who she is, or what she is supposed to be. Her brilliant, offhand mother seems unspeakably careless of her young daughter, who craves knowledge and understanding. She wants to be good enough, good at something, loved.

But it is Sadie's mother's story that will crack your heart wide open. I can't talk about this or give any of it away, only encourage you to read it. In part, please read it for the description of this woman's musical talent as revealed in several sections of the book. It is magnificent.

This is a risky way to tell a story, especially with the first section of the book being the least readable. But once you finish the book you will want to open it right back up and read the stories again. That's what I did. They are more painful the second time through, as you understand the adult actions that are so inexplicable to children. Very beautifully written.

Another reviewer said, if you love this, you might love the YA novel The Book Thief. That's a great book and I agree. But my recommendation would be Those Who Save Us, another suspenseful, beautiful book about the same time period and process.

Nancy Huston's "Fault Lines", an acclaimed best seller in France, is a peculiar read. The novel tells the story of four generations of one family, and the narrator of each story is a six year old child from a different generation of the family.

Although the character at the center of the story, Erra, is in each of the stories, that is where the connection between the characters and narratives stops. The stories are disjointed from each other, and the narrative voice in each is muddled and unbelievable. As I read this novel I couldn't help wondering if I was missing something that was lost in the translation of the novel from the original French to English. The last two stories, about Sadie and her mother Erra, were the best, and by the end of Erra's story I was emotionally involved--and the novel finally revealed the twist promised on the book jacket. The first story about Sol, the young boy in modern California, was downright disturbing. I certainly hope six year olds don't think like that, and that the French realize all Americans aren't like Sol!

I was disappointed by this book--it was not what I expected it to be. I thought the book would be more about the effect Erra's secret had on the generations of her family, but it didn't really explore those issues in a deep way, rather it brushed the surface of what could have been a much deeper and more interesting exploration.

I would encourage others to read this book, because like all literature, they might get something more out of it than I did. But overall, "Fault Lines" just was not for me.