The lesson of Shtrum’s moral fall lies in his reaction to it. All the obvious excuses occur to him, but he rejects them. “Good men and bad men alike are capable of weakness,” he concludes. “The difference is simply that a bad man will be proud all his life of one good deed—while an honest man is hardly aware of his good acts, but remembers a single sin for years on end.” Shtrum realizes that “it still wasn’t too late. He still had the strength to…remain his mother’s son…. He wanted this mean, cowardly act to stand all his life as a reproach; day and night it would be something to bring him back to himself.”
Grossman’s achievement lies in the profundity of his thought and his unflinching presentation of moral questions. For this reason, Life and Fate is indeed one of the great books of our time—despite its shortcomings as a novel. Grossman was fundamentally not a novelist but a journalist who had reflected on the totalitarian experience more deeply than his contemporaries. As a result, few of his characters are convincing as real people. Apart from Shtrum, they all seem like ideological mouthpieces. None is truly memorable—and that, perhaps, is the real test of a great novelist.
Going in without preconceived notions heightens your senses and allows you to form unbiased gut impressions. It lets your stomach, rather than your mind, lead the conversation, and rewards a la minute cravings. It also opens the door to discovery, allowing you to freely explore unpopular (that’s “untapped,” to you) regions of the menu. Branching away from a predetermined ordering plan means you can take cues from the environment around you, like the influencer snapping IG pics of a sizzling platter or the server who won’t stop ranting about the “Nobel Prize-worthy” oysters (whether he’s right or wrong, it’s definitely worth finding out). It’s a relief to shrug off the pressure to optimize the dining experience and go with the flow.
Arguably, every single historical novel should evoke those two much-quoted lines of William Faulkner’s: “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.” But coming away from Alice Hoffman’s gravely beautiful new novel, “The World That We Knew,” historical fiction that transports you to Germany and France in the 1940s and, thus, the Holocaust, those words ring particularly true. Her subjects are preteen and teenage refugees on the run from Berlin and Paris, but with them, she conjures up contemporary children fending for themselves after being separated from their parents by today’s horrors.
To begin “The Quaker” is to experience a case of hard-boiled deja vu: There’s the elusive serial killer who delights in toying with police; the obsessive, lone wolf detective who harbors his own secrets; the labyrinthine cityscape where evil finds plenty of places to hide. Initially, suspense fans might wonder just how many times we can amble down these familiar mean streets without feeling like the pavement is wearing thin. But, almost as soon as they arise, our doubts dissipate. In the hands of an inspired writer like Liam McIlvanney, it’s the very familiarity of the hard-boiled mystery formula — burnished to perfection — that gives “The Quaker” its sinister sheen of greatness.
The Year of the Monkey is a beautifully realized and unique memoir that chronicles a transformative year in the life of one of our most multi-talented creative voices. Smith's approach to nonfiction is unique and brave: It counts as true if it happened, if she imagined it, and if she felt it. This is a book about Smith and the world all around — and that world includes all of us. And that is just one more reason why everyone should read it.