The Song and the Truth
| Author | : | |
| Rating | : | 4.52 (562 Votes) |
| Asin | : | 0375702776 |
| Format Type | : | paperback |
| Number of Pages | : | 368 Pages |
| Publish Date | : | 2017-04-16 |
| Language | : | English |
DESCRIPTION:
A lovely book that helps the reader appreciate life landi3337 _Reviewed by Randy Farnsworth, author of "A Stand Yet Taken".As soon as I started reading this book, I found myself absolutely intrigued by the story. Seeing the magical world of early-twentieth century Indonesia from the eyes of a five year old was truly enjoyable. Ruebsamen has a way of writing that puts the reader directly into the mind of the narrator, and I honestly felt little Louise's excitements and disappointments. It was a real let-do. I couldn't put it down the book review that I read in the paper said that the first part of this book, which is set in Java is majical but that when the setting moves to Europe it becomes ordinary. I disagree. I ordered it because of the exotic early setting but I liked it even better as it went on. Description is important to me in a book and I thought that the writer actually lavished more of it on the European section, probably because this is an autobiographical . Unexpected, Excellent, and Enjoyable! A Customer Because this book is about Jews during WWII I thought it would be depressing - it wasn't. Because this book is told from a child's point of view I thought it would be childish or stream of consciousness - it wasn't. This book is alternately a little funny and a little sad, alternately vague and brilliantly lucid, but always it was engaging and delightful!
Living with her parents on the island of Java in the late 1930s, five-year-old Lulu moves in a magical world of daydreams and island myths. But when one day Lulu innocently describes a scene she stumbled across late one night, the repercussions are felt for many years and across two continents. Called from the sumptuous tropics back to The Hague, with stops in Marseilles, Paris, and London along the way, Lulu’s family is soon forced into hiding as the war approaches.A moving account of a childhood overwhelmed by history, The Song and the Truth is a profound meditation on how the paradox of memory–at once intransigent and elusive–shapes our lives.. Set against the backdrop of the Dutch East Indies and Nazi-occupied Holland, this luminous novel delivers epic themes filtered through the rich imagination of a young girl
New characters enter the plot roughly the way they enter a child's lifeAwith little or no explanation. These complexities do not overwhelm the novel's charm and poignancy, however, especially since Ruebsamen treats all her wayward characters with great tenderness. . Meanwhile, war looms, and fears about their relatives motivate the Bendas to return to Holland, where they live with various members of their complicated and colorful family. Written in the style of a youthful memoirAwith all of memory's distortions and defectionsAthe novel follows a Jewish family from their comfortable life in the exotic Dutch East Indies to their increasingly isolated existence in The Hague in 1939, and to their WWII hiding place in rural Holland. In the Java and Bali of her earliest years, Louise (called Lulu by her affectionate family) lives in a