Customer Reviews

Mathilda Savitch: A Novel

5 star:		(16)
4 star:		(19)
3 star:		(9)
2 star:		(9)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

Mathida's beautiful, vibrant, tempestuous older sister, Helene, died a year ago, having been pushed in front of a moving train, and no one in the Savitch family has recovered from the devastating loss. Yet, Mathilda (whose age is never explicitly stated, but whom I would guess is about thirteen) seems to be the only one willing or able to openly mourn. Conversely, her stricken mother, formerly a loving, attentive parent, is slowly disappearing into herself with the help of alcohol; her father, kind and well-meaning, allows his wife to continue shrinking from both him and their surviving child, leaving Mathilda desperate to draw out her parents' grief simply because she, alone, seems to be drowning in it.

Although the blurb on the back of the book states that the story is about Mattie uncovering the truth about her sister's death, this novel is in no way a mystery. What it is, is a razor-sharp exploration into grief and guilt, and the various ways these oppressive, horrifying emotions manifest in the people left behind.

Writing in the first person from Mathilda's perspective, author Victor Lodato gives his protagonist a uniquely insightful voice. Mattie is incredibly observant and thoughtful, and surprisingly profound in her view of life. She's also terribly troubled, and in need of more than she's being given right now by her preoccupied parents.

Great debut by Lodato, and highly suggested by this reviewer.

Although the story of "Mathilda Savitch" is fairly interesting (a bright young teenager dealing with her grief following the loss of her vivacious elder sister), the titular narrator just isn't believable. No girl of 12-14 is like Mathilda - even given the themes of loss and fear that permeate the novel. Everything that she said and did was so obviously an adult man's perception of what a teenage girl might say or do. Although the story was okay (a bit predictable, but enjoyable nonetheless) and the themes and expression thereof were interesting, I had trouble finishing the book just because I found Mathilda such an utterly unrealistic, two-dimensional character. One wonders if Mr. Lodato has ever spent significant time with a teenage girl - this probably would have been beneficial as he clearly cannot draw from his own experiences.

If the book had been written from the perspective of Mathilda's father, I probably would have enjoyed it more.

When I had first read the description of this book, I thought Mathilda was going to be wicked. Evil almost, in perhaps a humorous way. As I read the book however, I discovered that she is not really awful; she just needs some attention that she is not getting. After her sister dies her parents become pretty much turn off, and Mathilda is trying to deal with her own grieving but is really too young to handle it on her own. Combine that with adolescence, young love and a misunderstanding of how her sister truly died is what make Mathilda a likeable character. It is very easy to sympathize with her, and to want to help her throughout the book. She is frantically waving her arms but no one sees her, which can be frustrating but also very realistic. Sometimes it's hardest to notice the ones that need the most help.

Mathilda does have a spunky personality as well, so the book itself is not a total sob story, and it is entertaining to go through what she is going through (to a certain extent). I did enjoy reading this book, and will check out any other books this author has in the future. It was just different from what I normally read, and different in a good way. The dialogue, the characters, everything. I really enjoyed it.

This was an impulse buy and although I don't really regret it, I can't recommend it to others. The first chapter reeled me in, especially after just having read The Catcher in the Rye for the first time -- I'm surprised not more is made of the similarities between the two books. Of course, of the two this is the vastly inferior, even irrespective of its derivative nature. Others have complained of Mathilda's voice not really being "spot on" as the back-of-the-book copy says, and I agree that it doesn't sound like any real 14-year-old girl in this or any other time (including the strange future in which Mathilda lives). Instead, it sounds like a slightly feminized and younger Holden Caulfield. That's both the charm of the book and it's greatest flaw.

Mostly, the book wanders about aimlessly and there's no real conclusion at the end. Mathilda is a dynamic character, but you're not at all satisfied by the degree of her character's growth or anything else that takes place in the book. What kept me reading was the "shock factor" of what Mathilda said, did, and thought about, which I thought was both accurate for 14-year-old girls (excluding the vocabulary) and a bit creepy coming from a middle-aged male author. I mean, I know a lot of young girls are attracted to their female friends, but it's pretty pervy to think of the author writing this late at night.

The emotions and character flaws explored in this story are well-rendered, but nothing really happens in its 292 pages. Despite its promising start, I have to give Mathilda Savitch a thumbs down.

For every reader who calls this book book "fun" and "perky," I wonder how much thought they've given to the main character's actual situation. Victor Lodato has tried to create a disaffected teen much like the hero of "Catcher in the Rye," but he forgot to make Mathilda Savitch's problems solvable. Instead, he's burdened her with a set of predicaments that would cause serious neuroses in any person. For Mathilda, I wonder if she's going to make it to adulthood unscathed. She's lost her sister, possibly to murder (although, we find out, possibly to something much darker). Her mother's an alcoholic. The father is enabling the mother and shrinking within himself, refusing to face up to reality. No one is paying any attention to Mathilda, who runs about almost unattended. (Her age is unknown, although she seems to be about 14.)

Add to all this the fact that she lives is a grim post-9/11 world, where terrorism has advanced much further than it has in current society. Bombings have continued around the world. She carries around with her a mental image of Russian mothers who have lost their children. And she murmurs the last words of a blue-eyed terrorist who shot himself in the head on television: "You will all die." So, she builds a bomb shelter in her basement where she and her best friend and boy she has a crush on test it out. She is definitely sure that not too many people are going to be left in the near future.

Is this normal behavior for a young adolescent? I don't think so. It just gets worse. She spends much of her time mulling over who pushed her sister, Helene, in front of a train. "Who would do such a thing?" she keeps asking herself. And who was the boy she was going to see at the end of the line? Helene sent e-mail to this person, but Mathilda can't fathom who he is. Then one day she hacks into the e-mail account and discovers his identity.

This is where it really gets creepy. She sends him a blank e-mail from Helene's account. And then, even more bizarrely, she sends a blank e-mail from the dead Helene to her mother. What is the point of this? Even Mathilda doesn't seem to know. But she's so eager to get someone, anyone to pay attention to her that any reaction will do.

The jacket copy chirps about Mathilda solving the mystery of Helene's death, but no such thing happens. The reader only goes deeper into the mind of a deeply disturbed adolescent and comes out feeling none the better for it. Lodato offers no solutions that might ease Mathilda's psychic distress. Especially after she reveals her stunning, deep, dark secret, it's incumbent on him to provide some sort of way for her to cope. I can't help but wonder what audience this was meant to play to. For it really reads like a young adult novel, and it would be teenagers who would side most vehemently with Mathilda in her fight for sanity in a world gone mad. Yet it's marketed as a literary novel.

This novel tries mightily to please but hits wide of the mark.

Mathilda Savitch: A Novel is a deeply moving, very sad story of a brilliant but disturbed young girl grappling alone with untold grief following great tragedy in her family. The voice of the narrative is youthful and often quite funny yet there is a depth and complexity which is very stirring and thought provoking.

Mathilda Savitch is highly intelligent and wise beyond her years. Her parents are academicians and free thinkers. Both Mathilda and her sister have inherited their parents' fine intellects. At twelve she is insightful, pragmatic and bold. She is at that delicate age in adolescence where she has become a menstruating woman but she is still really a child ~ vulnerable, needy and sad. Her beloved sixteen year old sister Helene, the beautiful, altruistic light of her parents' lives, has died horrifically under a moving train. Although Mathilda maintains a humor which is sharp and quick, it is merely a veneer covering the great pain she endures from not only losing her sister but her parents as well.

After recalling an episode which "was pretty much a perfect day" in her life, a day she remembers her mother and sister riding on horseback side by side, "The two of them could have been sisters and I could have been the mother I was so proud of them", Mathilda realizes "This is the sort of thing we should be sitting around the table talking about. Telling stories about Helene, the best days we can remember. It's supposedly one of the ways normal people grieve." Mathilda realizes her family is not grieving normally. Her mother has closed herself off and retreated into serious alcoholism and total despondency. Without his adored wife as she once was, her father is lost and helpless.

"Instead I have to wake up one year after my sister ended and I have to put on her dress and march into the living room like a ghost. And even if it's awful it's the only way." Matilda feels she must resort to "awful" behavior in order to get through to her parents. Unfortunately her behavior only seems to drive the wedge deeper between them.

But more true and heart-breakingly so, Mathilda feels that she really is awful. She nicknames herself Lufwa, awful spelled backwards. There are questions about her sister's death and feelings of guilt which she locks deep within. Her preoccupation with the basement of her home is, I believe, symbolic of her subconscious where these perplexing issues hide. The basement is not only a place to hide but a safe haven from the troubled, terrorized world around her, a place to preserve her vulnerable sense of self.

Not only is Mathilda trying to come to her own terms with her sister's mysterious death but she has become absorbed in the national tragedies that are happening simultaneously. On the first year anniversary of Helene's death, the 9/11 terror occurs. While sitting in some classes where some of the teachers read off long lists of those who perished in the terror attacks, Mathilda wonders why "These dead people get special treatment because they died in a national tragedy. But I don't see how they're any different from normal people who die. Sometimes in the silence it's hard to keep myself from shouting her name. In the silence I get mad that no one is thinking about me, about my family."

In her own desperate way to find closure, appease her guilt and also broach the distance between herself and her grieving parents, Mathilda endeavors to unlock the mystery surrounding Helene's death.

This masterfully crafted novel is an engaging page-turner which is as sensitive and heartbreaking as it is smart and funny. It is written simply with a youthful tone of a precocious pre-teen girl yet contains a deeper nuance addressing adult sensibilities. I think Mathilda Savitch: A Novel is an extraordinary piece of modern fiction. What amazes me most is that Victor Lodato has so effectively and realistically represented the inner mental and emotional landscape of a troubled young girl. I applaud his uncanny insight and perceptiveness and highly recommend this beautiful and touching novel.

5.0 out of 5 stars An amazing spaceship of a novel, November 28, 2009
By Wanda B. Red (Boston, MA) - See all my reviews

Victor Lodato has done something nearly perfect in this book -- in his amazing narrator, Mathilda Savitch, caught in that moment of transition between the blessed heedlessness of childhood and the complexity of adult knowledge, a moment like the one in which Eve eats the apple. Mathilda's voice toggles between simple but penetrating descriptions of fabulous imaginative universes and a strangely touching jumbled matter-of-factness borrowed from common proverbial wisdom. The balance brilliantly captures the imaginative child who yearns to be accepted in a world she can't decide if she wants: "And besides," Mathilda writes, "now I know things about my body I didn't know back then. It's not the innocence of yesteryear, that's for sure" (4).

Matihlda's coming of age happens under the pressure of a tragedy in her family, the death of her older sister Helene (whose story gradually unfolds as the novel progresses). Interwoven with the Savitch family's personal tragedy are the ragged threads of a post-911 Age of Terror as experienced by a young person unsure of whether she is one of the guilty or one of the innocent (it's not an easy question, we aren't sure either).

Matihlda believes that, to save herself and her parents (Ma and Da, but especially Ma), she must do something "awful," must perform acts that will jar them into a fuller acknowledgment of what each one of them (and especially she) is denying. She breaks into her dead sister's email, she spends the night in a makeshift bombshelter with her friends, she torments the family with audiotapes of Helene singing. She briefly runs away from home as she tries on one identity after another as if they were her sister's yellow dress, a garment that she wears like a bride on HSSH day (the anniversary of Helene's death, a palindromic acronym for the sister's name that echoes the hush that surrounds her death).

Both in tone and genre, Mathilda Savitch reminds me of J. D. Salinger's "Catcher in the Rye." Here is a narrator who really "bursts upon the scene"; her language is so real and affecting that I went back to the beginning of the book after I had finished it because I simply couldn't bear to leave her voice behind. I'll go out on a limb here. Compared to Catcher in the Rye, "Mathilda Savitch" is the better book, the more vivid, the more emotionally real, the truer to the human spirit, finally the more hopeful.

As Mathilda herself writes, "The best stories are like that. They're like spaceships. They take you somewhere far away and you think, oh, what a weird place. But then you think, wait, maybe I've been here before. Maybe I was even born here" (238).

Mathilda has lost her sister in a terrible "accident" and as a result has sort of lost her mother and father also, as well as herself. Mathilda's older sister, Helene was a popular, beautiful, yet manic 16 year old, with secrets and a life her family didn't even know about.

This novel is about Mathilda and her relationships. She has an intense relationship with her best friend Anna blue eyed blonde beauty but is not so bright. She has a crush on the neighbor boy, Kevin, who has always been a friend. Mathilda is a smart girl, and is an outsider at school. But now that her sister has died and her parents are so distant, especially her mother, she feels even more estranged from the world. The fear of terrorism constantly lurks in her mind, often preoccupying her.

Matilda has begun to resort to bizarre and crazy behavior. On the anniversary of her sister's death, she puts on her sister's dress, although this act goes somewhat under the radar with most of the world because of yet another terrible terrorist act. She also has Anna and Kevin come spend the night in her basement to be safe from the terrorists, although they all lie to their parents about where they will be. Mathilda's acts and words have all sorts of unintended effects, except for the fact that they do bring her attention she desperately is crying out for.

Matilda has also been working on figuring out the password for Helene's emails--she just knows if she can get into her email, she can learn about who might have "pushed" Helene in front of the train that ultimately resulted in her death. She figures it out, and suddenly is faced with facts she may not have really wanted to know--but to assuage guilt she feels about things she said on the day of Helene's death, Mathilda follows through with her plans.

The voice of Mathilda voice is so pain-filled, sometimes this book was hard to read. Mathilda is so genuinely needy, and her parents, especially her mother, are so blind to her needs. Mathilda understands her parent's pain, but feels so closed off from them--they do not include her in their pain, and it is the pain of a family. Not to mention, her unrealistic beliefs and lack of knowledge about her sister's death are hurtful to her parents. She doesn't need a therapist as much as she needs her mother, but her mother is incapable of being a mother to her at this time.

Francine Prose's recent novel, 'Goldengrove' has a similar theme; girl's beautiful older sister dies, girl has need to explore the life of the dead sister, parents are upset by girl's actions, etc. But here, Mathilda is faced with problems like severe depression in her sister, her mother and probably herself. Mr' Lodato does a great job of conveying all this information through the voice of a child without ever coming right out and saying it. The writing is honest and believable, and you end up really liking Mathilda despite her odd choices--she knows she has crossed lines she should never cross, but she is also wildly sensitive to others, and she loves passionately as well.

Brief summary and review, no spoilers.

The narrator of the story is a young girl named Mathilda Savitch. The time is the present, or maybe one or two years from now, since there is mention of Mathilda being very young at the time of 9/11. We know that Mathilda is mourning the death of her big sister Helene, who Mathilda tells us was pushed onto a train track and killed. We know that Mathilda's "Ma" is depressed and withdrawn, and that her "Da" is trying to cope.

What we come to realize is that Mathilda is not the most reliable of narrators because of her grief. We know that she has seen a therapist, and that she often lies to friends and family. It's not that Mathilda is malevolent or a bad kid, but she has been shaken to her core by her sister's death. So as we continue to read this remarkable-in-some-ways novel, we gradually find out what's real and what isn't. What's the truth, and what was fabricated.

The remarkable part of this novel is Mathilda herself. But she was also a problem for me. I loved the voice, and the book jacket makes a comparison of this novel to two other books - Special Topics in Calamity Physics by Marisha Pessi, and Black Swan Green, by David Mitchell. I think the comparison is apt, and if you enjoyed those two books (like I did), then I think you will like this. All have quirky (to say the least) young person narrators, and all have interesting and comic voices.

The problem for me was that I did have some trouble at the end believing Mathilda was real. I was not bothered by the voice for most of the novel for some reason, but by the end I felt a bit frustrated. There were just a couple of places where I was thrown out of the story - where Mathilda's inner dialogue rang false for me, or where I just didn't buy what was physically happening in the story.

I did enjoy the book, and would recommend it. You can definitely get a feel for the book by reading the first page or two, so you may want to do that to help determine if this is something you'd like to read. I was hooked from the first page, and would definitely pick up another book by this author.

Although some reviewers found the voice in this "pitch-perfect" and spot-on, to me it seemed off-putting and contrived. Over and over I found myself thinking that no young girl in our time ever sounded or thought like this: it was more an older, writerly male's impression of how a young girl might sound, and it totally kept me from becoming lost in the fictional dream. For example, much of the language sounded too old and out of date for a contemporary girl--"What a night, I'm telling you. Odious. Odious with cherries on top." I teach gifted 6th to 12th graders, and this is not the kind of thing I can imagine any of them saying or writing for a character their age, any more than I could see them calling college professor parents "Ma" and "Da." Matilda's attitudes and emotions also frequently seemed off for a girl to me, as when she said that both she and her friend cried when they first got their periods. In fact, she often seemed more like a boy than a girl, as when she talked about pulling the legs off spiders and wanting to drop a plate. I know all individuals are different and characters can and should be unique, but just too much of the word use and characterization seemed artificial and off about Matilda Savage for me to see her as anything but a fiction. I was interested in her quest to find out what happened to her sister and her attraction to the boy next door, but the voice of the piece kept pushing me away. The way the present tense was used also didn't help: the dialog for two characters with "I say" and "he says" repeated every line. All in all, a disappointing book, since the author is obviously a very talented writer and had a good story to tell.