From Amazon.com
In
Howard's End, E.M. Forster exhorts his readers to "only connect." In
Breath and Shadows, Ella Leffland shows us how difficult that is to do. All of the characters in her elusive and exquisite fourth novel are connected, though none of them knows how truly intimate those bonds are. Spanning three centuries in the history of one family, Leffland presents us with three major characters: Thorkild the Counselor, a Danish dwarf already approaching the end of his life in the early 1800s; his great-granddaughter, Grethe Rosted, a young wife and mother living outside of Copenhagen in the 1880s; and Paula, their modern-day descendant, born in Illinois but living in Switzerland. Rather than organizing this generational tale chronologically, Leffland chooses to move back and forth between life stories, emphasizing for the reader a connectedness that the protagonists can only dimly understand. Grethe, for example, was orphaned at an early age and raised by relatives. She knows nothing about Thorkild and only a little about her grandfather, Thorkild's son, who escaped death as a child only to meet it on the battlefields in Napoleon's army. Wandering in her garden one day she muses:
If her grandfather had fallen a hairsbreadth differently, he would have perished on the fence spike, a child of tender age, without issue, a child with a child's seed dead before its journey. But for that millimeter her father would not have been born, she in turn would not have been born. Nothing. An eternal void.
Grethe understands that it is "only by the grace of a millimeter" that she is alive; she cannot know that her own grandchild will not even know that much about her. For Paula, just 10 months old when her mother left her father (Grethe's son), grew up never even knowing his name. It is for the reader to make those links that the characters never can: a grieving man's beloved only son becomes, in time, merely an anonymous paper silhouette on his great-granddaughter's wall; a young boy's "magic carpet" is barely rescued from the scrap heap 50 years later by an unknown daughter who will appreciate its beauty without ever understanding its significance. And with each succeeding generation still more will be lost until, at last, the only evidence of one's existence will lie solely in the genes. And yet Leffland's book is anything but depressing; we may all be "but breath and shadow, nothing more," but the fact that we choose to live at all in the face of oblivion is cause for celebration.
--Alix Wilber
From Publishers Weekly
The breadth and seriousness of Leffland's imagination has been evident in her four previous novels (most recently, The Knight, Death and the Devil), none of which resembles the other, and each of which combines formidable narrative gifts with a fidelity to background and to human nature. Here, the fragile beacon of moral integrity defies an enigmatic hereditary gloom and illuminates a richly imagined story of three generations of a Danish family over two centuries. Thorkild, born a dwarf and now a widowed financial adviser living in early 19th century Copenhagen, has been tormented by shame over his handicap all his life. When his beloved son and only child is killed in the battle of Leipzig, he gradually grows unhinged with grief, and his sister commits him to a mental institution. This tragic legacy becomes an unhealthy fixation for Thorkild's granddaughter, Grethe Rosted, the novel's second character, a happily married mother of two residing on the Northern Danish coast in the 1880s. Despite her pleasant life as a member of the liberal bourgeois circles then revolutionizing Scandinavian culture, Grethe slowly goes mad and devastates her family in one terrible, irreversible act. Paula, a middle-aged American woman living in present-day Switzerland, is the novel's third character and the granddaughter that Grethe never knew. She has fled a staid existence as the wife of a Swiss attorney to sculpt in a remote village in the Jura mountains, where she ponders the same painful questions that, unknown to her, anguished her ancestors: "It was as if God, if one believed in God, had forgotten to finish His task when He created human beings, had left out some essential, some terribly needed ingredient." Though the plot's complex genealogy is at times hard to follow, and the callousness and cruelty of some of the characters sometimes contrasts too neatly with the gentleness of those they harm, the theme resonates powerfully nonetheless. Leffland's graceful, poetic prose and her ability to create indelibly vivid settings (from a small hut in the Jura mountains to the bustle of 18th-century Copenhagen) is dazzling. Her intelligent, unsentimental assessment of the harshness that coexists with the beauty of life is beautifully conveyed through this clan's family inheritance of passion and disenchantment. Agent: Lois Wallace.
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.
