Customer Reviews

Liberation: A Novel

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Joanna Scott is an award-winning novelist, and Liberation is her eighth book.

Liberation starts with 10-year-old Adrianna Nardi hiding in a cupboard overnight, stuffed there to keep her safe from the liberating forces on the island of Elba. It is 1944.

Adrianna lives on the estate of La Chiatta with her mother Giulia. Once out of the cupboard she explores the estate and comes across a young Senegalese soldier, a part of the French liberating forces. He is escaping from his own army, after witnessing the aftermath of the rape and murder of a young girl.

Amdu Diop is an unusual young man, one who knows he is too good to kill. Adrianna communicates with him in her broken French. At their initial encounter he helps hide her from some brutish liberation forces that come to La Chiatta looking for collaborators.

Gunshots are fired simply to scare the residents. Adrianna runs back to her mother when this episode is over, but later brings some food and a blanket to the place where she last saw the young soldier.

These memories are interspersed with the story of Adrianna Rundel, age 70, traveling by train to Penn Station. It is the present day, and Adrianna is experiencing difficulty breathing, and eventually loses consciousness in the aisle as the train pulls into the station.

The narration of 10-year-old Adrianna, and of young Amdu, in a situation not of his choosing, where he is forced to kill or be killed, is absorbing and real. The landscape of Elba is so genuine you almost feel the rain and the dust. Scott's commentaries on the futility of war and violence are timely.

Armchair Interviews says: Scott is praised for her use of language, and Liberation is no exception.

Sixty years have passed since the war, but Adriana Rundel still remembers like it was yesterday. In fact just yesterday she celebrated her seventieth birthday with her spouse Robert and their children. This morning as she rides the commuter train from her Jersey Suburban home through Newark to Manhattan, she suffers a heart attack and quickly vanishes inside her memories of WWII hidden by her affluent family from the Nazis as a ten years old Jewish girl on the isle of Elba.

In 1944 on Elba, Adriana Nardi sees the teenage apparently AWOL Senegalese soldier Amdu Diop, who is hurt, separated from his unit, and trying to hide. As she tries to help the injured bungling soldier, she also becomes infatuated with him while he hopes to become a savior of mankind. However, her family will tragically soon intercede.

LIBERATION is a well written character study that compares the present with the past in the life of a survivor. Intriguingly Mrs. Rundel does the comparison between her exciting but dangerous childhood during WWII especially once her soldier enters her life to the boring but safe septuagenarian she has become. Though the other passengers on the Penn Station bound train seem like intruders on a personal tale between the lead protagonist and the audience, fans of powerfully profound dramas will treasure Joanna Scott's insightful tale.

Harriet Klausner

She was a girl, worthy enough to be hidden in a cabinet.

When Allied Forces invade the Italian island of Elba in June of 1944, Adriana Nardi's mother hides her daughter in a kitchen cabinet of their villa home. There she is safe from the war, from the Allied soldiers and , most importantly, from the march of time.

Time seeks to take Adriana. Already she is ten, almost eleven. The beauty and innocence of her spirit must be protected.

Amdu Diop, Senegalese soldier, future doctor, saint of his self-made religion, yearns to be free of desire. He wants to be safe at home, living a simple life and healing people with both medicine and prayer.

When Amdu is separated from his unit and grazed by a sniper's bullet, he comes to La Chiatta, home of Adriana Nardi. There he must rely on the goodness of the girl and her family for his survival.

War is war, and in the midst of it anything goes. The logical connection between cause and consequence is broken. Amdu must grapple with not only the ugliness in others, but the ugliness in himself and in a crime in which he is complicit.

When an act of heroism leads to tragedy and a fateful bargain with God, will Amdu and Adriana survive the time of justice?

The adult women of Adriana's family are difficult to distinguish and the book's use of French and Italian may be a struggle for some readers. However, the plotting and characterization more than make up for any inadequacies. Liberation sweeps us into its narrative flow and pushes us towards its inevitable conclusion. It reminds us that time is all consuming and challenges us to value every moment.

This excellent novel is a testamant to the author's ability to draw realistic and flawed individuals that are so interesting. I thought this book had a slow start at first, but once I got past the first few pages, I was racing to the end. Without a doubt I will be reading another Joanna Scott novel. I felt completely drawn into every scene that she wrote and I felt very attached to Adriana and Amdu. I finished the novel in my spare time over the course of two days. When I was done, instead of immediately diving into a new novel, of which I have so many I don't know what to do with myself and my ever growing "to read" pile, I have been thinking about it for a day and a half now. I loved the Amdu character. I loved the way she ended her novel. She didn't answer all the questions raised, and yet I didn't feel let down. It was the right thing to do since it kept me pondering for hours after I was done, about life and war and human frailties. I truly enjoyed this book.

Set on the Italian island of Elba towards the end of World War 2, Liberation centers on an unlikely friendship that develops between Amdu Diop, a sensitive and kindly young Senegalese soldier, and Adriana Nardi, a precocious and adventurous 10-year-old girl. We first meet Adriana on the first night of the allied liberation of Elba - that night she spent hiding in a cabinet beside the kitchen sink, hoping against hope that she will be able escape the ferocious allied bombing of the Island.

Adriana and her mother Giulia Nardi have largely escaped the horrors of the war, able to live a protected and insular life in La Chiatta, their exclusive walled estate. La Chiatta has spared them the deprivations of others largely because of the bounty of their gardens and the black-market trade with the military. But all this changes, when one afternoon, while walking in the olive groves, Adriana spies the disparate figure of black man, tumbling over a wall and onto the grass.

Adriana's first impulse is to cheer for him whatever he had done, and she as a dim notion that beyond the confines of her perception almost anything is possible. Later, when she meets Amdu for the first time, she's initially wary of this strange and exotic man, but she soon realizes that he's just solitary soldier who has fled the fighting, making his way onto the Nardi estate to find shelter and comfort.

Adriana doesn't have to fear Amdu, as he's been in the war for almost a year and still hadn't fired his rifle at anything alive. Making no secret of the fear that he would never kill a living creature, he considers himself as close to a saint as he could come without actually communicating with God. A young man with "noble aspirations and swift legs," he's now officially AWOL from his regiment, he admits he has a cowardly reputation, yet is liked by everyone who knows him.

Both Adriana and Amdu make hesitant steps to communicate, and soon their friendship blossoms. Adriana comforts the soldier through music, and Amdu entrances Adriana by showing her is mystical and spiritual side. For Adriana, there is something quite familiar about him, not just a brother but also a twin, but "a mixed-up version of herself, related to her in spirit if not in blood."

Whilst Adriana and Amdu bond, Giulia and her brother in law Mario Tonietti - publisher of the local newspaper and the future Mayor of Elba's largest town - discover the runway solder within the confines of La Chiatta. For the first time they are confronted with the dangers of caring for an injured African soldier, while the allied troops spread out across the Island and ferocious battles continue, also mindful of the unforgiving French captains out searching for absent troops. The Nardi family realizes that there's a fine line between occupation and collaboration, Amdu may be a well educated, and well-mannered boy, who has no weapon and is weak from his ordeal, but his presence in the compound spells trouble.

In astonishing prose, author Joanna Scott brings to life the liberation of Elba, cleverly juxtaposing Nadia's childhood experiences with her memories sixty years later as she rides on a train through New Jersey. Now known as Mrs. Rundell, Adriana discovers the profound influence that her memories have upon her consciousness - suddenly struck with a devastating heart attack, she realizes that her past experiences in the War cannot help but affect any decision she might make in regard to seeking the help of strangers.

Much of the drama in Liberation plays out against a background of intense battles; thousands of allied soldiers scour the island for the enemy, the defiant Germans holed up in their concrete redoubts, the ports vulnerable, and snipers posted in the villages. The characters are strong, sensitive, and resilient, mindful of these horrors of war, wary of helping strangers and aligning themselves with those who were fighting to end the war. Yet they are also humanitarians, willing to help a young man in crisis. The Nardi's are survivors, having endured the worst of the chaos, yet also aware that innocent civilians, who for the crime of being in the wrong place at the wrong time, are stripped and flogged to a bloody pulp by soldiers wielding army-issued belts.

Liberation is ultimately a story of the partisans, their leaders and their benefactors, and also the courage of one family's resistance. Adriana and Amdu discover that although they are very different, they both want the same things, to survive the war and to be blessed with a good long life. In a time when you had to choose: either you believed everything or nothing, their chance meeting with each other perhaps signifies the spiritual language of compassion and understanding, perchance-even love. Mike Leonard January 06.