How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents

Synopsis
The four Garcia sisters come to terms with their Dominican roots, their lives in America, and their emerging feminism.


My thoughts
I was really looking forward to reading this book. To be honest, I didn't enjoy it as much as I thought I would. The book would work well if it were just a series of standalone essays. But it tries to be more than that and falls short. Because the book goes in reverse chronological order, there is no resolution to many of the questions raised at the beginning, so it feels incomplete.

But I still have many positive things to say about the book. The girls all have distinct, strong, often conflicting personalities. The depiction of sibling rivalry is pitch perfect and the various crises the sisters face are entertaining to read and easy to relate to. The stories move along quickly, so it doesn't take long to become engrossed in them. (This was a huge plus for me—I read the book while I was visiting family and needed something I could pick up and read during the short gaps between family obligations.) The narrative shifts back and forth between the sisters, giving you a panoramic view of the younger generation's experiences and opinions. It makes you feel like you're friends with each of them, so you're privy to their personal insecurities and internecine squabbles.

There are various levels of culture clash—the older generation's difficult adjustment, the younger generation's intolerance of their parents' backwardness. Alvarez does a particularly good job describing the sisters' sense of homelessness, their inability to feel entirely at home as Americans or Dominicans and their struggles to define and own (with varying degrees of success) their identities as dual citizens. Her firsthand experience is apparent here.

Bottom line
The vignettes are resonant and highly personal, but don't expect a cohesive narrative or a sense of closure.

Fine print
How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents, by Julia Alvarez
Genre: Fiction
Photo from Goodreads
I borrowed this book from the library

The Invisible Bridge

Synopsis
Andras Lévi, a Hungarian Jewish student, leaves Budapest for Paris to study architecture. The future looks bright—he's a talented architect and he's fallen in love. But it's 1937.

My thoughts
I don't think a book's acknowledgments have ever made me cry. But Orringer's acknowledgments are a reminder that the best works of fiction have their roots in reality. It's impossible to know which of the book's events are inspired by truth and which sprang from Orringer's imagination, but she has managed to weave them together to create a moving account of a chapter of World War II that too few people know anything about.


Hungary's role in World War II is often overlooked, but it was an anomaly. (Hungary itself—a Magyar nation separating the northern Slavs from their southern brethren—has always been an anomaly too.) Hungary was formally aligned with Germany and Italy, but it entered the war reluctantly. The Nazis reacted with hostility to the Hungarian government's attempts to broker independent peace treaties with the Allies. They occupied the country and installed a puppet regime in 1944. Until then, the Hungarian government had resisted pressure from the Nazis to send its Jewish citizens to concentration camps. (That's not to say everything had been rosy for Hungary's Jewish citizens; they still faced persecution and discrimination, saw their rights stripped from them over the course of the war, and were forced to do menial labor for the armed services.) But the Nazi takeover was devastating. According to the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, more than two-thirds of Hungary's Jewish citizens died between March 1944 and the end of the war a little more than a year later. Today, Budapest has the most haunting Holocaust memorial I've ever seen. Near the Parliament building, dozens of pairs of empty bronze shoes lie abandoned in one long row along the banks of the Danube.

I was attracted to this book because of the history, but the strength of the book lies in the characters and their relationships with one another.

In Andras, Orringer perfectly captures the passion and potential, the naivete and optimism of a young man coming into his own despite the looming threat of war. The heart of the story is Andras's underdog love story. He becomes enchanted with the beautiful Klara Morgenstern, an alluring Hungarian mysteriously exiled to Paris to teach ballet lessons to support herself and her teenage daughter. There are shades of Moulin Rouge as she improbably falls for the penniless artiste, but I love a good love story and I loved rooting for them. Because of the complex backstory and complicating current events, their relationship is by no means a sure thing.

Orringer also takes the time to flesh out the supporting characters, particular Andras's brothers and the architecture student Polaner. All of them have compelling stories of their own and I grew attached to all of them despite my best efforts not to. (In a book like this, you know not everyone will live happily ever after, so the fewer characters you're invested in, the better your emotional state when it ends. At least that's the way it is for me.)

As the book (and the war) progress, Orringer wisely refrains from trying to describe too much. The tack she takes—sparingly depicting Andras's growing hopelessness—is much more effective. She even conveys Andras's weakening physical and mental state by cutting down the narration so that at times there are only sentence fragments.

Without giving away too much, the last chapters of the book are bittersweet. I renewed the book once and then kept it for as long as I could. I finished it at the library, sitting in a beautiful courtyard on an unseasonably warm December day. It was fitting that as I read the last few pages, one of the library's event coordinators was walking a prospective bride through the garden and helping her envision where the chuppah would stand.

Bottom line
One of the best books I read in 2011. We need books like this, books that vividly bring to life the truly shocking inhumanity of the Holocaust and other genocides.

Fine print
The Invisible Bridge, by Julie Orringer
Genre: Historical fiction
Photo from Goodreads
I borrowed this book from the library. Then I bought it.