2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
"We underestimated the power of words.", July 5, 2005
This review is from: Spies (Hardcover)
This unique novel is a psychological journey through the history, beginning with the Spanish Civil War and Germany's secret air force, as a young pilot wins the heart of an opera singer with Italian eyes. Four grandchildren, two sisters, a brother and a cousin, are the descendants of the dark-eyed singer and her pilot, their childhood spent in pursuit of clues to this mysterious woman's life, for the children carry the dominant trait, the flashing Italian eyes so unlike others in their neighborhood. The children form an impenetrable wall against the bullies who harass them for their difference, spending untold hours together discussing their grandparents, longing for at least one image of the opera singer, whose eyes can be found nowhere in the family album.
Three of the children are identified, Carl, Pauline and Nora, but their cousin, the narrator, remains unnamed and it is through him that the story plays out. In a blue-eyed world, these four children are an anomaly, their coloring hinting of unspoken family secrets. So what the adults keep to themselves, the children embroider, intent on their own truth. There is, indeed, a mystery to solve, for the opera singer's pilot disappeared for a time from the arms of his betrothed; he returned but as a keeper of secrets, a private, careful man. The children build another reality to embrace their search, sure that somehow they will solve the mystery of the wartime lovers, the four become spies, seekers of truth.
The author's prose is extraordinary, intimate, as though the narrator is whispering secrets that no one else can hear. The book shifts between generations, the narrator as an adult, the cousins as children, the war years and Germany's ultimate humiliation, the love affair of their exotic grandmother and her aviator. The characters are eccentric, quasi-residents of Grimm's Fairy Tales, as seen through the dark eyes of the children. Contradictions abound, for the narrator is careful to point out the many interpretations of a single incident, maybe this was what happened, maybe that. Spies is extraordinarily visual, smells, sights, sounds all part of the eloquent language, a shifting array of possibilities: "The black papa falcons, with their uneven wings, faulty beaks and misshapen heads have long been scraped off... and replaced with commercial decals of birds of prey."
In the end, the four cousins, now adults, are trapped in their intricate perceptions of each other, memories bound by the strange rituals of children, yet faced by an inevitable transition into adulthood. This astonishing novel carries with it the bright memories of youth, an intimate knowledge of war and a generation defined by its terrible consequences, but also the innate curiosity of youth, the stories that frame a past drastically altered by history, where secrets take on a life of their own and magical eyes inhabit the foolish dreams of children clutching a world more real than the future. Finally, the narrator admits: "We underestimated the power of words". Luan Gaines/2005.
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1 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
A Novel of German Grandchildren, July 21, 2005
This review is from: Spies (Hardcover)
"What did you do during the war, Grandpa" must have had an entirely different meaning in Germany (or Japan) than it did in this country. The loosers of a war must an entirely different viewpoint than the victors. This is perhaps especially World War II with it's horrific memories of the holocaust.
This novel explores this situation from the eyes of four children who find family photo albums showing a beautiful opera singer with "Italian eyes." Perhaps this is the origin of their own dark eyes in a world of blue eyed kids. That the other kids taunt them would not be unexpected, kids are mean to anyone they consider an outsider. That other family members forbid the children to speak of the family's past is much more forbidding.
This is not your standard assembly line mystery story. This is a story from a first rate writer, and it just happens to be his first. It is clear that this won't be his last.
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