Wednesday, May 22, 2013

Sandcastle Girls, by Chris Bohjalian

Not such a happy, feel-good book, huh? But there are pieces that were redemptive, I think.

I'm fascinated in particular by the encounters (not just the romantic ones) between people of different cultures, both abroad and in the U.S. itself.

I will admit it was The Slaughter You Know Next to Nothing About, though I had heard of it and knew the general time frame and situation.

And I'm interested that this author, though male, writes complex and plausible female characters. I've read others of his books and found the same thing.

What were your thoughts?

18 comments:

  1. Please, discuss. I will be around today (Wednesday), then internet-less Thursday through Monday, I think. Niece is graduating from high school. I will check back in when I return for your brilliant thoughts.

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  2. I have to admit that it took me three attempts to get through this book. The most horrifying descriptions of torture and genocide just weighed on me too much. When it got so I didn't want to turn another page, I put it down for a week or so and then tried again.

    I did ultimately finish the book but I honestly can't decide whether or not I enjoyed it. I know it was good for me to read it because, you're quite correct esperanza, I didn't have a clue about this event in history until now. Perhaps "enjoy" is the wrong sentiment to try and attach to reading this one. I think it's fair to say that I liked it but wouldn't go so far as to say I enjoyed it.

    It was certainly well written. The story flowed well and kept my interest. I will be looking for other books by the same author though I am hoping he has some lighter themes. At a few points in the book I thought "This would be really easy reading if it weren't such a difficult story."

    I am off to a conference this weekend and will have limited interweb time, so I'll check in when I return.

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    1. yeah, kinda like eating your vegetables. Good for me to read it, both in a "bearing witness" way as kathy suggests below, and to be informed. I think without the contemporary narrator it would have been unbearable. The switches to the later years of the century, and the first of this one, gave me a bit of a break.

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    2. That is a really great point, about the modern interludes making the history bearable.

      I insisted on going to the Peace Memorial and museum in Hiroshima, and also to the Holocaust Museum in D.C. Something pulls me to not forget, even though the events were long before my time. But both places, I got to a certain point and had to leave. Seeing the photos and artifacts up close was so emotionally overwhelming.

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  3. I think all of this author's other books are probably lighter. This was in a way a personal journey of his own family's past. That really resonates for me, because my husband's Armenian grandparents escaped as teenagers, but lost most of their own. The story of this genocide is part of my own children's story.

    Like the author, my husband is half Armenian; he mostly has the features, but hazel eyes and a last name that does not end with "ian." But my husband was raised with his Armenian grandparents, and identifies as Armenian. He traveled last year to Armenia with an organization similar to Habitat for Humanity, and was so thrilled to do good work and see some things. For him, it was a kind of holding and reconciling with the past -- like children and grandchildren of Holocaust survivors visiting the museums or memorials or camps. But different -- he was building a house and a barn for a family that somehow survived the genocide, and also survived a huge earthquake in about 1989 -- that family had lived in sheds since the earthquake.

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    1. I remember reading something of his and found it to be pretty intense. Not so violent, but pretty intense. Not that I can remember what it was, exactly.

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  4. Things happen that are so horribly unimaginable. How do we live with that?

    One triumph of this book is in talking about bearing witness. One of the most moving sub-plots for me is the story of the German soldiers who took photographs, and of someone saving them from destruction, and of the consulate finding a way for the nuns to take them finally to safety.

    There is also the unspeakable horror and triumph of refugees bearing witness to atrocities -- ones they might never be able to talk about fully. Such serendipity, such glory, that little Hatoun survived and thrived, and named her daughter Alice. This -- I know that it happens sometimes -- that despite the very worst, people survive.

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  5. Elizabeth -- how unprepared was she to take her fancy college degree and a little nursing training to a genocide? She was raised to be a philanthropic do-gooder, but I find her an interesting character. She turned out so much stronger than her commanding and successful father, when they began to see the worst. I loved the ways she dismissed the "gentlemen" who tried to hit on her, and insisted on the dirty work at the hospital, on going to the far-away camp where so many were taken to die in the desert. Tough, strong, caring, smart. Got to admire that in a woman who came of age around 100 years ago.

    Elizabeth is in no way perfect. It is highly unsettling that she never told her beloved that his wife (whom he was sure was dead) had survived, but then killed herself. That was the most hideous of all the secrets. And yet, it seems she kept that information -- with all the other horrible information -- for someone to find later.

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  6. I like how the characters are drawn; I like the back and forth between points in time and points of view. This book is well written from those standpoints.

    But I think what really draws me in is that it is about bearing witness. That it is important to tell even the worst stories. To keep a record. To remember. To not let it happen again, if that is in one's power.

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    1. And the horrible irony that those same German soldiers, or rather ones very like them, who were horrified (or disturbed enough to document and bear witness)by the atrocities of the Turkish officials, would in a few years be Nazi soldiers who did the very same things. Do we never learn?

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  7. The German soldiers in this book were punished for trying to preserve evidence, and they were sent to the front. There probably were dissenters when the Nazis rose to power, but that regime was even more ruthless.

    I think there is a danger in categorizing and condemning whole groups of people -- and maybe that is one of the big points in the book.

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  8. Here is Hitler's statement in 1939, mentioning the genocide of the Armenians: http://www.armenian-genocide.org/hitler.html

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  9. What did you make of the title?

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  10. I wonder if the author meant that kids still have dreams; that building things together is universal? Elizabeth built them on Cape Cod; Hatoun built them in the desert. But another layer might be that the things we build, some will turn out to be ephemeral in the long picture.

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  11. A character I really liked was the Muslim doctor at the hospital where Elizabeth worked treating Armenian refugees. Such a wise and kind man, getting up every day to do what he could for those who came his way; saying his pieces from the Koran -- things that are universal and appeal to the better in human nature. Training this American girl to relieve suffering.

    I'm not sure how clear this is, but the Armenians were an ethnic and religious minority. It probably was not all that safe for this Muslim doctor to be so devoted to their care during those years. Not that safe for the nuns and relief missions, either.

    Another character I rather liked was the American consul -- who worried into the night about the magnitude of the horror, who tried to find ways to tell the world (but get his reports past the censors). And then he got the nuns to sneak the photos out!

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What do you think?