Sashenka

Epic and romantic were some of the descriptors that attracted me to Simon Montefiore's Sashenka. And the book did not disappoint. The story begins in 1916 as the Russian revolution is about to erupt. Sashenka is a young, beautiful, wealthy teenager who rejects her bourgeois upbringing and becomes a Bolshevik activist with the code name "Comrade Snowfox."

Cut to 1939, and she is married to a party leader -- both of them "completely committed to the rapture of the Revolution" -- raising two kids whom she adores. Although Stalin's reign of terror is over, even the smallest infraction can lead to imprisonment or even execution. Thus, when Sashenka embarks on a torrid affair with a writer who is anything but a party loyalist, and her husband suspects the affair and tapes one of their clandestine meetings, the couple's comfortable life comes apart at the seams. With the help of their friend Comrade Hercules, she and her husband manage to spirit her children away just before they are arrested, and she endures torture (vividly and horribly depicted by the historian Montefiore) without breaking just long enough to ensure that the children are safe.

The third part of the book takes place in 1994. A young historian, Katinka Kinsky, is selected to research the family history of a Russian woman who says she was adopted during the revolution. You can imagine what Katinka learns, but there are still some surprises, and more romance, in store.

Out Stealing Horses

I decided it was time to read something that wasn't about some horrible war going on around the world... but it turned out not to be as easy as I thought it would be. I chose Out Stealing Horses by Per Pettersen, which is about an older Norwegian man named Trond living a quiet contemplative life in a remote part of Norway. It sounded nice and peaceful, but I should have noticed on the Amazon description that something happens that evokes memories of 1948... duh, WWII.

Anyway, I got totally caught up in the novel, including the war part -- a really fascinating story about love and betrayal -- and I loved Pettersen's use of language and descriptions of the natural world and Trond's place in it:

"I shut my eyes into a squint and looked across the water flowing past below the window, shining and glittering like a thousand stars, like the Milky Way could sometimes do in the autumn rushing foamingly on and winding through the night in an endless stream, and you could lie out there beside the fjord at home in the vast darkness with your back against the hard sloping rock gazing up until your eyes hurt, feeling the weight of the universe in all of its immensity press down on your chest until you could scarcely breathe or on the contrary be lifted up and simply float away like a mere speck of human flesh in a limitless vacuum, never to return. Just thinking about it could make you vanish a little."

Pettersen moves from present to past smoothly and doesn't give too much away too soon. But unfortunately, it all ends abruptly, and I felt the author wrapped things up way too quickly, as if he just got tired of the story and wanted to move on to something else.

Sarajevo

The books I've been reading over the past year or so have taken me all over the world and across time. My next stop: Sarajevo during the siege of Sarajevo in the 1990s. I am embarrassed to say that my recollection of this horrific event is vague, even though I have a good friend who came to the United States from Bosnia as a political refugee about that time.

Now, thanks to The Cellist from Sarajevo by Steven Galloway, I think I have an inkling of what happened and why the breakdown of Sarajevo's multiethnic community was so tragic. Galloway gives us three characters in addition to the cellist himself. Since this is a work of fiction, the cellist, who is based on a real person, is the only character not well developed. Rather, the novel tells the story of how the cellist's actions affected normal Sarajevans.

The true story behind the novel is this: After 22 people waiting in line to buy bread were massacred, the cellist Vedran Smajlović defied the risk of appearing on the street and, for 22 days, played Albinoni's Adagio in G minor in their honor. Meanwhile, in the hills surrounding Sarajevo, snipers picked off innocent civilians as they went about their daily lives.

All of the characters face their own moral dilemmas as they try to survive the siege. Although all are affected by the cellist's actions, only one has any direct relationship with him: a woman sniper code-named Arrow who has been assigned to protect the cellist by picking off would-be assassins hiding in the hills. His music touches her, indeed it even seems to touch the assassin waiting to kill him. Arrow does not want to kill the assassin, but she must. Yet later, when she is ordered to kill again, she refuses, putting her own life in danger.

"She didn't have to be filled with hatred. The music demanded that she remember this, that she know to a certainty that the world still had the capacity for goodness. The notes were proof of that."