The Madannos Of Leningrad
(DEBRA DEAN)
Memory is fragile, and flexible. Even its failures serve us at times. The
Madonnas of Leningrad, the first novel by Seattle
professor Debra Dean, is the story of Marina, a young museum docent who takes
refuge in the Hermitage during the 1941 siege of Leningrad. The paintings and artifacts are
gone, carefully packed and shipped out of reach of German bombs. On the advice
of a babushka, an older woman on the museum staff, Marina builds a Memory palace: a museum in
her mind where each painting still hangs on the wall. The memory palace serves
as Marina''s
anchor and salvation, an exercise of imagination where she pictures a future
for herself and the baby she is carrying. Of all the works in the famed
collection, the paintings of Madonnas most inspire her.
After the siege, Marina
finds her beloved Dmitri in a German POW camp. They make their way to Seattle, where they raise
two children who know little about their mother''s wartime experience.
Dean merges past and present in prose that shines like the gilt frames in
the Hermitage. The story shifts seamlessly from 1941 to the present, just as
Alzheimer''s shifts time within Marina''s
mind. The heart of the story is its flashbacks, when we walk the Spanish Hall
with Marina,
aching with loss and hunger. As she commits scenes, colors, even brushstrokes
to memory, the paintings come alive. Chapters narrated by her daughter Helen
show us the present, when Marina
slips away at a family gathering. During the search, Helen, herself a mother
and an artist, wonders about the memories parents choose to tell their children
and the memories they keep secret.
Drawn in part from Dean''s observations of her grandmother''s life with
Alzheimer''s, The Madonnas of Leningrad is an artful story, lovingly
told, that illustrates how humans deal with trauma?the physical privations and
fears of war, and the slow deterioration of the mind itself. Like the empty
frames on the museum walls, this novel of memory and forgetting glows with love
and hope.
Resumos Relacionados
- Stream-of-consciousness And Dream States In Proust's "swann's Way: Remembrance Of Things Past"
- Stream-of-consciousness And Swann's Way: Remembrance Of Things Past
- From The Mixed-up Files Of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweller
- When A Mother Don''t Show Love To Her Children Or Others
- The Emperor's Children
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