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(And I’d totally check out her blog at joyunexpected.com. She does some great photography work and her daughter is -adorable-.)
I’ve read a fair share of Holocaust novels, some good, some bad, and I was hoping to lump Skeletons at the Feast by Christ Bohjalian in with the good ones. Unfortunately, this story of four main characters struggling through the latter parts of WWII and caught between the Russians and the Germans was disappointing.
So why did I read the book through? A few months ago I read The Double Bind by the same author and had many of the same struggles I dealt with in this book. Chris Bohjalian has a way of slowly gaining pace with a character in his stories, then switching to the next character just when you feel the momentum has picked up. However, in The Double Bind, the last chapter of the book completely rewrote my opinion of it and boosted the book from a lowly 2 stars to 4 stars. I was hoping that this book would have a similar redeeming factor about it. It did not.
Skeletons at the Feast deals with four characters and those who are close to them. There is the Scottish, Callum, who is being held as a PoW by Anna and her family, a young refugee woman who is shown to be his lover in the first few pages of the book. I have read that this book is supposed to show the struggles that Anna deals with in coming face-to-face with seeing what the Nazi army has been doing, but I saw very little of this in the book. Instead, her focus seems to be more on keeping Callum and her horses.
There is also Uri. A Jew who escapes his fate and jumps from the train transporting his family. He assumes various identities and goes on his own private mission against the German army.
And finally there is Cecile, a young French woman caught in the hell that is the concentration camp and struggling to survive. This character was the only character in the book that seemed alive and not cut from a cookie-cutter. It was easy to sympathize with her and cheer for her, unlike the other three characters.
The strongest problem I had with the book was the, uncalled-for at times, descriptions of the atrocities committed. It felt as if Bohjalian had realized that this may be the only chance he gets to write a novel about this subject and so he felt compelled to go into fantastic detail. It’s a fine line to walk, to educate without using the acts for the shock factor. I don’t think he erred on the side of wisdom with how he treated that subject matter. So with all that said, this book gets 2 stars from me. I definitely would not pick it up again, and I would not recommend it to anyone.
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