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lindacbugg's review against another edition
5.0
Man Booker #4
Very good & very sad(which I was expecting)
Very good & very sad(which I was expecting)
ciska's review against another edition
3.0
The author
Born in Toronto in 1975, Alison grew up in Kitchener, Ontario and in Quebec’s Eastern Townships. She has a BA in Psychology from the University of Guelph and an M Phil from Memorial University of Newfoundland and Labrador. Currently on faculty in the Humber School for Writers' Creative Writing by Correspondence program, Alison Pick in Toronto where she is at work on a memoir. For more information visit http://www.alisonpick.com
The review
This book left me a bit disappointed and I am not sure why. The point of view in the book is changing on a regular base. Though the effort has been made to make clear who is talking it is confusing at points but not to disturbing. I found it difficult to connect to Martha though she was supposed to be the sympathetic person in the book. There where to many things going on with her to get a clear view of the woman she was supposed to be. In a way she was behaving like a scared abused person but her thoughts where very strong at points not fitting in that characteristic. Easier was it to connect to Pavel and Pepik almost as easy as it was to get angry with Anneliese at points. Still I cannot escape the feeling there was so much more story behind all these characters that was left out.
The story of the journalist is very nicely woven into the whole situation. I like the way that is set up.
Still I cannot be very enthusiastic about the book, I enjoyed it enough but am not sure I would recommend it to other people.
Born in Toronto in 1975, Alison grew up in Kitchener, Ontario and in Quebec’s Eastern Townships. She has a BA in Psychology from the University of Guelph and an M Phil from Memorial University of Newfoundland and Labrador. Currently on faculty in the Humber School for Writers' Creative Writing by Correspondence program, Alison Pick in Toronto where she is at work on a memoir. For more information visit http://www.alisonpick.com
The review
This book left me a bit disappointed and I am not sure why. The point of view in the book is changing on a regular base. Though the effort has been made to make clear who is talking it is confusing at points but not to disturbing. I found it difficult to connect to Martha though she was supposed to be the sympathetic person in the book. There where to many things going on with her to get a clear view of the woman she was supposed to be. In a way she was behaving like a scared abused person but her thoughts where very strong at points not fitting in that characteristic. Easier was it to connect to Pavel and Pepik almost as easy as it was to get angry with Anneliese at points. Still I cannot escape the feeling there was so much more story behind all these characters that was left out.
The story of the journalist is very nicely woven into the whole situation. I like the way that is set up.
Still I cannot be very enthusiastic about the book, I enjoyed it enough but am not sure I would recommend it to other people.
nocto's review against another edition
4.0
This is the first book I've picked up from the 2011 Booker Prize longlist. By the end of the Kindle sample - where I usually decide whether I want to keep reading or not - I really wasn't into the story, hadn't figured the characters out and wasn't especially bothered about keeping reading. I went against my own judgement however and carried on. And got captivated by the family story.
In retrospect it is hard to understand why all Jewish families weren't taking every opportunity to flee from Nazism in 1938. This book does a great job of painting the picture of a pretty ordinary family in Czechoslovakia, with Jewish heritage but not really practising Jews, seeing jobs and opportunities taken away from them, being betrayed by friends and still not really getting how bad it was going to get.
As is pointed out in other reviews, the decision to send children to safety on the Kindertransport is central to the story, and I thought the "contemporary framing story" (phrasing stolen from Fleur) was necessary to show the after effects of the Kindertransport and made this into a 21st century book rather than one that could have been told anytime post-World War II. I completely agree with Fleur that it was an excellent decision to tell the main story through the eyes of the non-Jewish non-family member nanny though, Marta had just enough distance from the main characters to tell the story objectively whilst still being involved in the story.
A good book, that doesn't get five stars from me because I found the beginning confusing, but I thought it was well worth a read and a Booker longlist place.
In retrospect it is hard to understand why all Jewish families weren't taking every opportunity to flee from Nazism in 1938. This book does a great job of painting the picture of a pretty ordinary family in Czechoslovakia, with Jewish heritage but not really practising Jews, seeing jobs and opportunities taken away from them, being betrayed by friends and still not really getting how bad it was going to get.
As is pointed out in other reviews, the decision to send children to safety on the Kindertransport is central to the story, and I thought the "contemporary framing story" (phrasing stolen from Fleur) was necessary to show the after effects of the Kindertransport and made this into a 21st century book rather than one that could have been told anytime post-World War II. I completely agree with Fleur that it was an excellent decision to tell the main story through the eyes of the non-Jewish non-family member nanny though, Marta had just enough distance from the main characters to tell the story objectively whilst still being involved in the story.
A good book, that doesn't get five stars from me because I found the beginning confusing, but I thought it was well worth a read and a Booker longlist place.
wordnerdy's review against another edition
3.0
http://wordnerdy.blogspot.com/2011/05/2011-book-129.html
tatbenatar's review against another edition
4.0
Absolutely beautiful in the most heart-breaking of ways. It's a slow start, but once you begin to let yourself fully be taken into this book, you can not put it down.
edgeworth's review against another edition
3.0
I picked this up back in 2011 when it was longlisted for the Booker Prize and I wanted to read all the nominees; however, it was cut from the final shortlist before I read it, so I never got around to it.
Many of the books longlisted that year had a twin in terms of theme and subject; Far To Go and Half-Blood Blues are both novels dealing with lesser-known aspects of Nazi Germany and the Holocaust. In the case of Half-Blood Blues this was black German citizens; in the case of Far To Go it is the Kindertransport, a rescue mission in the year preceding the war which successfully took nearly 10,000 Jewish children to sanctuary in the United Kingdom from Nazi Germany’s sphere of influence.
Far To Go takes place in Czechoslovakia, first in the Sudetenland and then in Prague, following the Bauer family: father Pavel, mother Anneliese, nanny Marta, and six-year-old Pepik. The Bauers are secular, non-practising Jews, but of course this does not matter to the Nazis. As the oppressions upon their freedom slowly multiply, and as the continent slouches towards war, the Bauer family must make a difficult decision about whether or not to send Pepik away. Much of the novel is about the uncertainty the Jews of Europe faced in the lead-up to the Holocaust. It seems incredible to someone in the modern day that Jews would not take any opportunity they could to flee, but we have the benefit of hindsight; it would have been a difficult thing to abandon a hometown, a family business, friends and relatives, when one had no idea that the oppression would culminate in genocide. It’s particularly awful when reading of families who fled to places which they believed would be safe but which we know were not: Prague, Amsterdam, Paris.
More importantly, though, Far To Go is about the fog of history and memory, tying in with the fate of the transported children themselves: their lives were saved, but they were cut off from their families, their culture, their history. The Kindertransport was only intended to be temporary, but the families left behind almost always died in the camps; these Jewish children were cut adrift. Segments of Far To Go are narrated by a mysterious woman who similarly feels a sense of loss, of not belonging, despite not being from the Kindertransport herself. By the end of the novel it is clear that it has been, somewhat, a piece of metafiction; an imagining of a past that is impossible to reconstruct.
Alison Pick is more well-known in Canada as a poet than an author, and Far To Go is only her second novel. Her prose is competent and flows well, yet never sat quite right with me; too often the dialogue feels constructed, the writing feels a little uncertain of itself. This is less noticeable later in the book, as more momentous and emotional events are occurring, but for the first 100-odd pages it felt a bit awkward. She also sometimes feels to be trying a bit too hard to establish a sense of time, awkwardly inserting bits of contemporary culture (“She could see a copy of the new Henry Miller book, Tropic of Cancer.”)
In this sense it is similar to Half-Blood Blues in more than just subject matter; I would regard both novels as good, but not great. (Interestingly, both also have a protagonist who betrays loved ones to the Nazis as retribution for their own perceived betrayals, and are then forever haunted by that moment of selfishness.) Half-Blood Blues is probably the slightly better novel, which is perhaps why it was shortlisted over Far To Go. Neither, in my eyes, ever really deserved to win it. They are both competent, compelling, important books in which the author successfully instils the emotion and passion necessary for such a serious subject; yet I felt they also both lacked something, some final spark which would have carried them over the finish line and made them truly great.
Many of the books longlisted that year had a twin in terms of theme and subject; Far To Go and Half-Blood Blues are both novels dealing with lesser-known aspects of Nazi Germany and the Holocaust. In the case of Half-Blood Blues this was black German citizens; in the case of Far To Go it is the Kindertransport, a rescue mission in the year preceding the war which successfully took nearly 10,000 Jewish children to sanctuary in the United Kingdom from Nazi Germany’s sphere of influence.
Far To Go takes place in Czechoslovakia, first in the Sudetenland and then in Prague, following the Bauer family: father Pavel, mother Anneliese, nanny Marta, and six-year-old Pepik. The Bauers are secular, non-practising Jews, but of course this does not matter to the Nazis. As the oppressions upon their freedom slowly multiply, and as the continent slouches towards war, the Bauer family must make a difficult decision about whether or not to send Pepik away. Much of the novel is about the uncertainty the Jews of Europe faced in the lead-up to the Holocaust. It seems incredible to someone in the modern day that Jews would not take any opportunity they could to flee, but we have the benefit of hindsight; it would have been a difficult thing to abandon a hometown, a family business, friends and relatives, when one had no idea that the oppression would culminate in genocide. It’s particularly awful when reading of families who fled to places which they believed would be safe but which we know were not: Prague, Amsterdam, Paris.
More importantly, though, Far To Go is about the fog of history and memory, tying in with the fate of the transported children themselves: their lives were saved, but they were cut off from their families, their culture, their history. The Kindertransport was only intended to be temporary, but the families left behind almost always died in the camps; these Jewish children were cut adrift. Segments of Far To Go are narrated by a mysterious woman who similarly feels a sense of loss, of not belonging, despite not being from the Kindertransport herself. By the end of the novel it is clear that it has been, somewhat, a piece of metafiction; an imagining of a past that is impossible to reconstruct.
Alison Pick is more well-known in Canada as a poet than an author, and Far To Go is only her second novel. Her prose is competent and flows well, yet never sat quite right with me; too often the dialogue feels constructed, the writing feels a little uncertain of itself. This is less noticeable later in the book, as more momentous and emotional events are occurring, but for the first 100-odd pages it felt a bit awkward. She also sometimes feels to be trying a bit too hard to establish a sense of time, awkwardly inserting bits of contemporary culture (“She could see a copy of the new Henry Miller book, Tropic of Cancer.”)
In this sense it is similar to Half-Blood Blues in more than just subject matter; I would regard both novels as good, but not great. (Interestingly, both also have a protagonist who betrays loved ones to the Nazis as retribution for their own perceived betrayals, and are then forever haunted by that moment of selfishness.) Half-Blood Blues is probably the slightly better novel, which is perhaps why it was shortlisted over Far To Go. Neither, in my eyes, ever really deserved to win it. They are both competent, compelling, important books in which the author successfully instils the emotion and passion necessary for such a serious subject; yet I felt they also both lacked something, some final spark which would have carried them over the finish line and made them truly great.
gh7's review against another edition
3.0
I was enjoying this until I realised the author was writing a different novel to the one I wanted to read, was following characters I wasn't interested in. There were clues early on that this was going to go off the rails when an overwrought narrator kept interrupting the wartime narrative to speak in the first person. However, these interludes were short so it was easy to ignore them and hope for the best. What interested me initially was she focused on two characters who were potentially dangerous to the Jewish family at the heart of this novel. Almost always in Holocaust novels the author concentrates on the good guys and makes little effort to depict the bad guys with any insight. They're just plain evil as if that's all we need to know. For a long stretch of this novel I thought the author was going to give us the bad guys. Marta is the housekeeper of a wealthy Jewish family in the Sudetenland. She's having an affair with the pernicious foreman of her employer's fabric factory. She's not a bad person but she's resentful, uneducated, emotionally unstable, easily influenced and clearly dangerous to the wellbeing of the Jewish family that employs her. Most of the considerable tension of the early part of the novel is provided by the volatile whims of these two characters. We're dealing with the banality of evil.
Then at a certain point a lot of melodramatic domestic stuff happens - the mother, who now takes over from Marta as the villain of the piece and is incoherent throughout the book, sleeps with a Nazi and Marta sleeps with her ward's father. The novel's focus undergoes a sea change. This becomes still more evident when the narrative abandons the family and instead follows the young son on his journey to England as part of the kindertransport programme. Here I utterly lost interest. The tone became sentimental, the artistry clumsy. There then follows a long section in the first person that reveals the entire wartime narrative is artifice. I'm afraid I didn't find this clever. I found it annoying. A very cheap trick. The novel became mainstream cinema - no matter how much bad stuff happens the end will make you feel a bit better about everything.
There's a scene early on in this book where a group of youths beat a Jewish tailor to death and I wondered why authors never try to get inside the heads of these characters. It's easy to imagine the good guys. Far more challenging would be to investigate the bad guys. The bad guy in this novel simply disappears when the plot no longer needs him. He's nothing but a convenient plot device to add tension.
Then at a certain point a lot of melodramatic domestic stuff happens - the mother, who now takes over from Marta as the villain of the piece and is incoherent throughout the book, sleeps with a Nazi and Marta sleeps with her ward's father. The novel's focus undergoes a sea change. This becomes still more evident when the narrative abandons the family and instead follows the young son on his journey to England as part of the kindertransport programme. Here I utterly lost interest. The tone became sentimental, the artistry clumsy. There then follows a long section in the first person that reveals the entire wartime narrative is artifice. I'm afraid I didn't find this clever. I found it annoying. A very cheap trick. The novel became mainstream cinema - no matter how much bad stuff happens the end will make you feel a bit better about everything.
There's a scene early on in this book where a group of youths beat a Jewish tailor to death and I wondered why authors never try to get inside the heads of these characters. It's easy to imagine the good guys. Far more challenging would be to investigate the bad guys. The bad guy in this novel simply disappears when the plot no longer needs him. He's nothing but a convenient plot device to add tension.
athira's review against another edition
5.0
Imagine if a war is brewing around you, but you don't have the knowledge of WW2, its history, causes, and its ultimate two tragedies (the Holocaust and the atom bombings) and their repercussions. Imagine that you are not lucky enough to have read about what Hitler did, from your living room or classroom, and rail against his actions in indignation, disgust and disbelief. Imagine that WW2 never happened - instead it is only going to happen, soon, in exactly the same way and we are going to be puppets in Hitler's hands, again. As a member of a designated "inferior" race, would you trust the people who stood by you all these years - friends, neighbors, colleagues? As a non-member of the said "inferior" race, would you betray your friends, neighbors, colleagues, and even little kids, all because a self-styled leader is brandishing a supremacy theory? This is what Alison Pick's Far to Go asks the reader. Not what choices you would make now, but what you would have done then. It puts you in the shoes of the people who had no idea about what is unfolding about them, what is going to happen.
Far to Go follows two story lines - one is set during the year leading to the start of WW2 and the other is set in the present. The events of the past are narrated mostly from the perspective of Marta, a non-Jewish nanny staying with a Jewish family - Pavel and Anneliese Bauer and their son Pipik. The present is written in second-person narrative with the identity of the characters not revealed until the last few chapters. The Bauers are an affluent and secular Czech family, who have not practiced their religion in years. At the time of the events in the book, however, in 1938-39, having a Jewish grandparent was enough to make a person Jewish in the eyes of the SS officers.
At the beginning of the book, Pavel is telling Marta about an anti-Semitic attack that his brother faced. Marta is very confused by all the anti-Jewish sentiments floating around her. She likes and respects the Bauers, and looks after Pepik as if he was her own son. But when Ernst, Pavel's colleague, whom Marta meets secretly at night, talks about the inferiority of the Jewish people, she is truly unsure of what to believe. On the one hand, she can't fathom how such a thing could be true. Aren't they just like her? On the other hand, she wants to believe Ernst, wants to impress him. And thinks there there possibly is some difference between the Jews and her.
I've wondered many times how people could just accept Hilter's dogma, when so many people were being killed, many disappearing into camps. I knew the facts - how easy it is to be swayed, how many young people wanted to "belong" and be seen doing something important, how they wanted to get over the WW1 failure. But it is one thing reading about it and a totally different thing actually feeling it or living it. I thought that Far to Go helped me answer those questions in the best way - by putting me in the shoes of Marta. She is no perfect person, just like many others during that period. She has considered Hilter's theories, committed a truly life-changing act towards the Bauers as an act of defiance, and not tried to rescue the Bauers' from a swindler. I so wanted her to stand up and tell the truth. In the end, I could understand why she did what she did. It was not right, but it was the only way she would have done it.
Far to Go also explores the Jewish identity, or rather the meaning of being one. Not in the religious or theoretical sense, but more in the sense of the believers' actions. The Bauers were assimilated Jews - they were as non-Jewish as could be. They didn't follow the Jewish customs, they celebrated Christmas. And yet, the arrival of Hitler triggers something in them. Pavel becomes increasingly proud of his Jewish heritage and opposes his wife's desire to baptize Pepik. Anneliese, on the other hand, distances herself further from the faith. It becomes evident soon that they had never had a conversation about their religion.
Rather than being just another WW2 fiction, Far to Go is actually about the Kindertransport, a program by which nearly 10,000 children were sent without their parents out of Nazi-occupied areas. Pepik too is put on the train, but the process by which the Bauers managed to get Pepik on was not straightforward. They suffered a lot, and struggled with the many choices they and Marta made. The events of this book have relation to the author's background - Alison Pick's own Jewish grandparents left Czechoslovakia to Canada without telling their children that they were Jewish. The dedication section of the book has a list of 12 people, 8 of whom died between 1942 and 1944. No guessing was needed to know how or why most, if not all, must have died. Even though it's no secret that millions lost their lives during WW2, seeing so many members of the same family on the same page is painful. Two of them were not even past 10 years of age.
When the book started off in the present in the second-person narrative, I was worried. I'm not a fan of that form of narration, but surprisingly, I thought it worked well here. I myself write in second-person sometimes when I write my reviews, if I want to project my experience on to the reader, so that you can be the one experiencing instead of me. In that same respect, I thought it worked really well here, because obviously I didn't put the book down. The narration is occasionally interrupted by a few letters - many of them truly heart-breaking.
Alison Pick's writing pulled me in the right from the start. There is a frank bluntness about her prose that makes you want to keep turning the page. She examines emotions in a very unflinching manner; there are no perfect characters here, everyone is flawed. Even though Pavel is mostly a good person, Pipik an innocent child, and Marta a poor girl who just knows what she hears, it is Anneliese who I most sympathized with. She could be selfish, appear uncaring, show disregard towards the help, but she was willing to do anything, even lose her honor, to save her family. It was sad. Overall, I strongly recommend this book. It is beautiful, poignant and very powerful!
Far to Go follows two story lines - one is set during the year leading to the start of WW2 and the other is set in the present. The events of the past are narrated mostly from the perspective of Marta, a non-Jewish nanny staying with a Jewish family - Pavel and Anneliese Bauer and their son Pipik. The present is written in second-person narrative with the identity of the characters not revealed until the last few chapters. The Bauers are an affluent and secular Czech family, who have not practiced their religion in years. At the time of the events in the book, however, in 1938-39, having a Jewish grandparent was enough to make a person Jewish in the eyes of the SS officers.
At the beginning of the book, Pavel is telling Marta about an anti-Semitic attack that his brother faced. Marta is very confused by all the anti-Jewish sentiments floating around her. She likes and respects the Bauers, and looks after Pepik as if he was her own son. But when Ernst, Pavel's colleague, whom Marta meets secretly at night, talks about the inferiority of the Jewish people, she is truly unsure of what to believe. On the one hand, she can't fathom how such a thing could be true. Aren't they just like her? On the other hand, she wants to believe Ernst, wants to impress him. And thinks there there possibly is some difference between the Jews and her.
I've wondered many times how people could just accept Hilter's dogma, when so many people were being killed, many disappearing into camps. I knew the facts - how easy it is to be swayed, how many young people wanted to "belong" and be seen doing something important, how they wanted to get over the WW1 failure. But it is one thing reading about it and a totally different thing actually feeling it or living it. I thought that Far to Go helped me answer those questions in the best way - by putting me in the shoes of Marta. She is no perfect person, just like many others during that period. She has considered Hilter's theories, committed a truly life-changing act towards the Bauers as an act of defiance, and not tried to rescue the Bauers' from a swindler. I so wanted her to stand up and tell the truth. In the end, I could understand why she did what she did. It was not right, but it was the only way she would have done it.
Far to Go also explores the Jewish identity, or rather the meaning of being one. Not in the religious or theoretical sense, but more in the sense of the believers' actions. The Bauers were assimilated Jews - they were as non-Jewish as could be. They didn't follow the Jewish customs, they celebrated Christmas. And yet, the arrival of Hitler triggers something in them. Pavel becomes increasingly proud of his Jewish heritage and opposes his wife's desire to baptize Pepik. Anneliese, on the other hand, distances herself further from the faith. It becomes evident soon that they had never had a conversation about their religion.
Rather than being just another WW2 fiction, Far to Go is actually about the Kindertransport, a program by which nearly 10,000 children were sent without their parents out of Nazi-occupied areas. Pepik too is put on the train, but the process by which the Bauers managed to get Pepik on was not straightforward. They suffered a lot, and struggled with the many choices they and Marta made. The events of this book have relation to the author's background - Alison Pick's own Jewish grandparents left Czechoslovakia to Canada without telling their children that they were Jewish. The dedication section of the book has a list of 12 people, 8 of whom died between 1942 and 1944. No guessing was needed to know how or why most, if not all, must have died. Even though it's no secret that millions lost their lives during WW2, seeing so many members of the same family on the same page is painful. Two of them were not even past 10 years of age.
When the book started off in the present in the second-person narrative, I was worried. I'm not a fan of that form of narration, but surprisingly, I thought it worked well here. I myself write in second-person sometimes when I write my reviews, if I want to project my experience on to the reader, so that you can be the one experiencing instead of me. In that same respect, I thought it worked really well here, because obviously I didn't put the book down. The narration is occasionally interrupted by a few letters - many of them truly heart-breaking.
Alison Pick's writing pulled me in the right from the start. There is a frank bluntness about her prose that makes you want to keep turning the page. She examines emotions in a very unflinching manner; there are no perfect characters here, everyone is flawed. Even though Pavel is mostly a good person, Pipik an innocent child, and Marta a poor girl who just knows what she hears, it is Anneliese who I most sympathized with. She could be selfish, appear uncaring, show disregard towards the help, but she was willing to do anything, even lose her honor, to save her family. It was sad. Overall, I strongly recommend this book. It is beautiful, poignant and very powerful!