Customer Reviews

The Man in the Box

5 star:		(3)
4 star:		(4)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

Because he is on the verge (in my opinion) of greatness. If he challenges himself more as a writer and a wordsmith and deepens his thinking, he will be under serious consideration for the Nobel. He is a humanist. And his writing is great humanist writing, but his ability (again, my humble opinion) has not yet matured. *ALL* of his books so far are worth reading.

The strength of The Man in the Box is the clarity of the depiction of complex characters - even bit characters. The narrator's grandfather, for example, is referred to only in one short passage explaining the half-orphanhood of the narrator's best friend. Yet in the short passage a real three dimensional portrait of a hard, drinking man unmissed except, perhaps, by his wife.

No one is wholely evil or wholely saint ... in fact the motivation for hiding the Jew in the box is less than morally pure. And the Jew, isolated in his box with adolescents as his primary audience, has a wide range of responses to his current situation and to his excessive time to review his past.

This is not yet a great book but it is very good and its strength indicate that Thomas Moran is a writer well worth watching for.

I would give my .... to be able to write this way. Everything is fresh as seen through the eyes of a adolesent growing up in a remote village in Austria during the war. His father hides a jew to pay back a old debt, but soon the responsibility to keep this man alive and sane falls to the boy and his blind friend. The life in this village is discribed until you began to care about the school teacher, wince when something embarrassing happens, dispise the town bully, and wish you could visit the place yourself. Nothing in this book was predictable, I didn't know what was going to happen until the end and I didn't want the end to come to soon. This is not a typical comming of age novel. It is written in a way that shows the good & bad in everyone. It does not try to solve the "race" problem. Nobody is perfect yet everyone is very human. I can't wait for his next novel.

I liked this novel very much and thought the characters were believable and memorable. I think Moran captured the moral reality of everyday heroism--as well as the fact that many people who do good just do it and aren't sure why, just as those who do evil just do it. But I am very puzzled by Moran's handling of Niki and am still not sure of the sex of the protagonist although, unlike my co-reviewers,............... Perhaps Niki's vague sexual identity is meant to represent the thin line between good and eveil, Christian and Jew, who knows? I found it all a bit distracting. But I loved the book and will buy Moran's other works.

Moran's characters fully find their voice. Life is wierd, and Moran gives us a full color picture from inside their brains. Like nothing you've ever read.

Thomas Moran has made a wonderful debut as a fiction author with this compelling, chilling, moving tale of Niki Lukasser growing up in Nazi Austria with a Jew, Dr. Weiss, walled up for his own protection, in the barn. This is an unusual story but it is created and built up in ways that make it believable. No good deed or bad will go unpunished and betrayal is an always quietly lurking shadow among the people. The relationships are complicated, particulary the child and the man in the box, and the author makes ambiguous all the various choices of the characters. There is no black or white, good or evil, just people making good and bad decisions, often for very personal and odd reasons.

I thought this would be the adventure of a Jew in hiding during WWII. Actually it focuses on the lives of a small village in Austria during that time - the family that hid him, their neighbors, the school teacher, and most of the others in the town in one way or another. It had less to do with the Jew being discovered or the war, and much more about the adolescent years of the protagonist Niki and his/her blind best friend Sigi. (I challenge you to prove which sex Niki is; everytime I thought I knew for sure I was turned around again.) The story seemed to me to be about tolerance and acceptance of oneself and others in the 1940's, with many of the conversations taking place between the Jew hidden behind a false wall in the barn, and Niki and Sigi.

Our Book Club in Rockville Maryland selected this book as the first for this year. The most frequently asked questions which we could not answer to our satisfaction and could not find in any reviews were about the various symbolisms in the story. Blindness is obviously a theme - the blind girl, villagers' blindness to the presence of the Jew in the box, German/Austrian blindness to the Holocost BUT what is the symbolism of Nikki becoming half blind at the end of the story. We were puzzled.