Customer Reviews

The Pieces from Berlin

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Having read the tepid review in the New York Times, I was anxious to decide for myself. While the framework of the plot is certainly beguiling, the story moves at such a languid pace I was anxious to read further in the hope that the story might gain some momentum. The frequent asides, and constant change of subject, is not what one expects in a novel. I often finished a paragraph wanting more. The exposition of the characters is incomplete and I fet that I didn't really get to know anyone well except for Lucia, the protagonist. Moreover, anachronistic inventions should never be used since they detract from the plausibility of the story. For instance, the reference to the use of plastic dishes in a Berlin hotel in 1943, or the reference to attempts at CPR (modern day cardiopulmonary resescitation) in London, circa 1945. All in all, a disappointing read. Other books tackling the same subject are much more gripping.

Pye has written a beautiful book about a flawed person, Lucia Muller-Rossi. This 92-year-old matriarch, living in Zurich, made out extremely well during World War II, not only stealing (or "saving", as she rationalizes) antiques and art pieces from Jewish victims of the Holocaust, but also informing the Nazis on the whereabouts of her Jewish friends. Toward the end of the war, when Berlin was about to fall, Muller-Rossi was able to take these possessions out of Berlin in several large trucks, cross the border into Switzerland, and set up shop. The book's action is built around two hard-to-believe coincidences. First, that one of her victims happens to walk past Muller-Rossi's store window and recognize a table that had been taken from her 60 years earlier. Second, that right at that moment when the victim, Sarah Freeman, spots the table, Muller-Rossi's granddaughter walks by, sees Freeman crying, and asks what's wrong. Seemingly implausible, but I bought it. What I struggled with was why Muller-Rossi's granddaughter, Helen, and son -- Helen's father, Nicholas -- were so willing to side with Freeman at the expense of Muller-Rossi. We simply had to take this leap that son and granddaughter were willing to accept a stranger's story without giving Lucia a chance to explain her side of events. As a reader of a novel, we did get a sense of Lucia's side, but unfortunately, there wasn't much to like. She was, plain and simple, an opportunist without much of a decent bone in her body, mother of a young son during wartime or not. Although Pye's writing and evocation of time and place is splendid, the book would ultimately have been more powerful if Muller-Rossi had been created as a more sympathetic character. One of Pye's key points is that life can be quite grey. Unfortunately, his main character comes off as black-and-white.

Lucia Müller-Rossi is a 90 year old antiques dealer in Zürich, Switzerland. She has a son, Nicholas, and a granddaughter, Helen, with whom she has a rather formal contact. This is due to the fact that the family has a secret: the antiques that Lucia is selling were not obtained honestly, but were given to her for storage by Berlin Jews. When one day one of her victims, Sarah Freeman, recognizes one of the tables in the antiques shop as her own, the family finally has to face the truth, which leads to a big domestic drama.

The facts on which this novel is built are of course fascinating: the trade in Jewish goods which "changed owner" illegally during the Nazi regime. Unfortunately, the story remains unclear for a long time and there are a number of story lines that have not been exploited properly: what is the role of Peter Clarke, why did Helen never before confront her grandmother with the truth and what happens in the end with the table that started it all? A missed chance, a pity.

Michael Pye's book had the surprising ability to make me think about the Holocaust in some new ways. I say surprising because this moral ground has been well traveled in literature, theater and film. In the service of remembrance, we have all read or seen a vast litany of Nazi atrocities, with the unintended and unfortunate effect of making us numb to the horror.
But Pye does a remarkable job of showing us that there is still a lot to talk about.
The character Lucia morphs from textbook villain, to misunderstood mother, to even greater villain without ever becoming a cartoon. Her actions can make the reader alternately sympathize with and abhor her.
Even more interesting are the questions of national and religious identity. Just when you think you've figured out the books moral point of view, a revelation about one of the main characters gets you thinking all over again.

Michael Pye has managed to take a very interesting subject and a very charged part of world history (WWII, Nazi Germany, stolen art) and make it thoroughly boring and disinteresting. The pace of the novel is so slow that by the time he reveals pertinent aspects of the plot the reader doesn't care anymore (at least that's how I felt). This novel is inundated with sub-plots that are never developed (ie: Helen's relationship with her husband, her child, even her father Nicolas; one of the main characters) and the language eventually becomes tiresome and self-important. By the time the novel is finished you feel like you've pressed fast-forward through most of the book and don't have much to take away except fleeting images of clarity that are superceded by a mess of a plot with almost zero forward moving action. This book is at best: unsatisfactory.

I came to the local library for a good read and found "The Pieces From Berlin". It looked and sounded interesting, the WWII setting sounded gripping, and the plot even more so. But the book moved so slow that by the time I got half way through I was bored to tears that I could hardly keep my eyes open reading it and I decided to put the book down and find something else. A beautiful and moving story set in WWII to the present about friends and family searching for answers to their unanswered time-old questions was completely drained by Michael Pye's long, redundant, almost unecassary text. A good idea gone wrong, by the time you're ready to finish you're not even close to done. But if you're a patient, fast, thoughtful reader, then this would be a good read.

Berlin during World War II. A Swiss lady, Lucia Muller-Rossi, struggles along to make a living as a mistress to an ambassador and raise her son Nicholas. But soon Lucia discovers a new source of income: she becomes the guardian of all the lovely things - furniture, china, jewellery - that the Jews were forced to dispose of before being led to the death camps. Being Swiss, Lucia has no trouble at all leaving Germany and returning to Zurich, thus making the antiques her own property. Sixty years later, the owner of a small table happens to pass by the window of Lucia's shop ...
"The Pieces from Berlin" can be read like a suspense story in which the reader glimpses the truth here and there as Mr Pye's characters struggle to answer the questions that thread through their lives: what are their obligations to their family members and to what lengths are they allowed to go to protect them? Like memories, the plot in this novel is a jigsaw puzzle which will eventually be completed in the denouement as the pieces neatly fall into place.