Customer Reviews

A Memory of War

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

 

 

Perhaps I shouldn't marvel that someone would give this beautifully crafted book one star, but then again I think I understand. I was half-way through the book when my library called and told me they had The Da Vinci Code I'd requested two months earlier. I set aside Mr. Busch's work and dashed through Dan Brown's popular thriller. It was a gripping piece of fluff with about as much character development and attention to place as a cereal box. I enjoyed myself, but it was a delight to return to A Memory of War, and immerse myself once again in a master's meditation on memory and fallibility.

Alex is a disturbed soul whose life disintegrates before our eyes as he examines how we construct a sense of self out the memories and memorabilia of life. That the journey happens almost exclusively within his consciousness, wherein he recreates the history of his family as well as relationships with his psychotherapy clients, is perfectly sensible. For anyone who needs to have a narrative thread with carefully marked events to follow a story, Mr. Busch's meditation would be challenging indeed. The invitation is to suspend critical thought and go as the mind goes, hither and yon, from present moment to past and back again. Note your own mind sometimes and observe how often reverie intrudes on your awareness. A word in a conversation can transport you to other scenes, other moments with other people.

Nothing is neatly tied together in this beautiful book, yet Mr. Busch's characterizations are rich and haunting. This is the stuff of real life, of real struggle with coming to terms with loss, disappointment, longing, fear, confusion. I feel so much gratitude that I have encountered this author and look forward to reading more of his sumptuous prose. I'll still enjoy an occasional thriller, but cotton candy aside, it is wonderful to know where to find real literature when I seek something more than diversion. Five stars for this exceptional writing is easy!

I feel slightly guilty only giving A Memory of War four stars. Frederick Busch is a wonderful writer. I was disappointed by this book, but I think that is due to my faulty expectations. I selected it because I was intrigued by the plot and I enjoy literary historical fiction. The central concept is simple and compelling. Alex Lescziak is a New York psychoanalyst whose parents escaped from Poland and lived in England during World War II. One day a new patient reveals himself to be Alex's half brother, William Kessler. William's father Otto was a German prisoner of war who had an affair with Alex's mother Sylvia in England, while Alex was a toddler. There are two sub-plots. One revolves around Alex's wife, Liz,who he suspects is having an affair with his best friend, and the other involves one of his patients, Nella, with whom he is having an affair. She is suicidal and now missing.

I was expecting two narrative streams, one following events in the present (1985) and one actually telling the story of Sylvia and Otto. In fact, the reader experiences all of the characters through Alex's consciousness. We know the characters only through Alex's imagination. I really disliked this while I was reading the book. However, after finishing it, I find myself still thinking about Alex and all of the other characters. It turns out that I was able to accept the book on its own terms afterall. Busch convinced me that his was the "true" story, regardless of the facts. On one level it bothers me that the book offers a single perspective -- probably because I expected something different -- but it is strangely satifying anyway.

Perhaps this novel ends up with some redemptive message about relationships and the human condition. However, unless you don't mind wading through the sordid, you may never get to that message in this novel.

I guess my tags here say it all: holocaust, Auschwitz, Jews, family relationships, psychotherapy, adultery, World War II (and passing references to WWI too), and Vietnam. The fact is, there's so much stuff in this densely complex novel that I often found myself going back to reread parts that I hadn't paid enough attention to the first time through. Because here is a novel so richly researched and imagined that it will stay in your mind for a long time after you put the book down. A Memory of War encompasses two wars - WWII, which precipitated the flight and immigration of the parents of the protagonist, Dr Alex Lescziak, a middle-aged clinical psychologist in NYC; and Vietnam, represented by one of his patients, a brutal, duplicitous and damaged Transit Authority cop, who served in SE Asia.

Lescziak is perhaps one of the most intricately imagined anti-heroes in recent modern fiction. Perhaps suffering from career-related burnout, he has entered into an unethical and adulterous affair with a disturbed woman patient young enough to be his daughter. And yet he still loves his wife of twenty-some years, although he fantasizes (imagines?) that she is carrying on an affair with his best friend, a psychiatrist. Another patient key to the whole novel is William Kessler, a man who claims to be Lescziak's half-brother, the result of an affair between Alex's mother and a German POW in England's Lake District during the last year of the war, when the Lescziaks were refugee workers there.

Alex is torn by Kessler's tale, but believes him enough to research his stories at the NYC Public Library, where he apparently finds enough to richly imagine in near-pornographic detail his mother's affair with the German, how she must have felt and how it all might have happened. The details of England and the drab, sordid living conditions of the refugee workers there are so vivid that you can almost feel the fog and taste the awful food and smell the community bathrooms where the Lescziaks lived in squalor there.

But better there than in the death camps where so many Jews ended up. Auschwitz III shows up here too, as Alex's mother, Sylvia, imagines the possible fate of her lover, Otto Kessler, after he escapes and disappears.

The scenes of sexual betrayal and seduction here are many and richly detailed. There is Alex's wife, Liz, and her imagined (or are they real?) trysts with Teddy Levenson, Alex's best friend. Alex's own affair with his probably irreparably damaged patient, Nella, whose mother was a suicide. Sylvia Lescziak's desperate and sad liaison with the German, Otto. All of these sexual connections are rendered in graphic yet somehow beautiful prose.

This is a story that is hard to describe, because it is so richly imagined and beautifully rendered in exquisitely precise language. I have read several of Fred Busch's books now and A Memory of War is perhaps the most complex and meticulously researched of them all. It is not an easy book to read; it demands much of a reader. Which makes me wonder how it did, commercially. Probably not well. Which is a tragedy. What a craftsman Fred Busch was. A Memory of War is proof of that - a literary treasure. - Tim Bazett, author of SOLDIER BOY: AT PLAY IN THE ASA

Unlike the previous customer review, I stuck this thing out to the end. I wasted my time. I bought it bbecause it was purported to be about the Lake District in WWII, but it was hardly that. I've been to the Enlish Lake District many times, though I doubt Mr. Busch EVER has. He captures none of its Wordsworthian beauty. The back of the jacket has praise from people nobody's ever heard of, or certainly I haven't. Worse there is a picture of the author on the rear flap. Very smug, it seems to shout at the reader "Gotcha to pay money for this, didn't I?" The book is a mess, transitions absent, characters self-pitying, scenes wailing. I've read Mr. Busch before and liked him. Doubt, after this one, I ever will again. It was just an awful experience, esp. when my reading time is precious to me. JKC

I had a difficult time getting into, following, making sense of this book. I gave up on it at page 35. It was very disjointed, rather like the protagonist's mind, I suppose, but I couldn't follow it and lost interest.

I did not want to rate the book since I did not finish it, but I have to give it something or my entry is not accepted, so I'll give it a 1 star. But keep in mind that I didn't read the entire book.