Sometimes historical fiction is faithful to the last details, and other times it relies on a kernel of truth to blossom into an enticing, though largely fabricated, narrative. Stella is solidly in the second camp. Based on the real-life Stella Kübler, a German Jewish woman who famously collaborated with the Gestapo during WWII to expose… Continue reading Stella
Author: LB
The Memory Police
How does the loss of semantic memory affect our identities, our understanding of the world, and even our ability to live? This is the question at the center of Yoko Ogawa’s The Memory Police, originally published in Japan in 1994 and translated into English in 2019. This ethereal sci-fi exploration of memory follows an unnamed… Continue reading The Memory Police
The Bridgetower Sonata
Sonata per un mulattico lunatico. This is the dedication that Ludwig van Beethoven affectionately gave to his Violin Sonata No. 9, a piece deemed not only too hard to play, but also “outrageously unintelligible” and an affront to music, by contemporary virtuosic violinists. Due to a falling out, Beethoven ultimately rededicated the piece, leaving its… Continue reading The Bridgetower Sonata
The Heart
Under the craft of a skilled writer, even the most straightforward story idea can breathe poetry. Such is the case in de Kerangal’s The Heart, originally published in French under the title Réparer les vivants (literally translated as “mend the living”). From the first line, Simon Limbres is introduced, or at least his heart is,… Continue reading The Heart
Daniil and Vanya
It’s a familiar story in the North American psyche, a culture of people who are perhaps too eager to adopt, snatching up the first child that becomes available, putting full trust in their adoption agency with reckless blindness towards the traumatic and toxic conditions of those unregulated orphanages: a bright-eyed couple adopts a child from Russia only to find that they suffer from reactive attachment disorder (read: a childhood-trauma-induced lack of empathy that exhibits similarly to sociopathy).