Skeletons at the Feast
by Chris Bohjalian
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Book Reviews of Skeletons at the Feast
Book Review: A fearless account of one of the greatest tragedies of the 20th century
Summary: 5 Stars
Chris Bohjalian is the author of 11 previous novels, and in every effort he has tackled serious ethical, moral and social issues that challenge his characters in different ways. Two of his prior works --- PAST THE BLEACHERS and MIDWIVES --- were turned into successful made-for-TV movies. His latest, SKELETONS AT THE FEAST, was inspired in part by an actual diary a friend asked Bohjalian to read in 1998; it had been kept by his friend's East Prussian grandmother from 1920 to 1945.
Taking place during the final six months of World War II, SKELETONS AT THE FEAST follows the evacuation of the Emmerich family from their estate in East Prussia to points west of Berlin, Germany. These aristocrats must make the tough decision of abandoning an estate their family has owned for generations in an effort to stay well ahead of the fast-approaching Soviet army. Tales of atrocities to which the Soviet army has subjected their prisoners are enough to force the Emmerichs to act quickly and begin their hasty retreat west.
Rolf Emmerich, the father of this clan, is called into battle by the German army along with his two eldest sons, and they are not able to accompany the rest of their family on their harrowing trek. This leaves his wife, "Mutti" (as she is called by her loved ones), and her children, Anna and Theo, to travel on their own, following others from their area who are also embarking on a journey west. Joining the Emmerichs is Callum Finella, a 20-year-old Scottish POW who had been captured hours before the Normandy invasion and forced into labor on the Emmerichs' estate. Complicating matters is the fact that Callum must hide beneath sacks of grain on the Emmerichs' wagon so as to not be seen by German forces they may encounter in the area. Additionally, Callum and 18-year-old Anna have secretly fallen in love.
Shortly into their trek, the group meets "Manfred," a 26-year-old German officer. Unbeknownst to the Emmerichs and Callum, "Manfred" is actually Uri Singer, a Jew who managed to escape from a transport train heading to Auschwitz, abandoning his family in the process. During his time in disguise, Uri has continually sabotaged the Nazi war effort wherever he can and found himself driven to murderous heights that only such traumatic and life-preserving situations could call for. His hope is also to head west and be taken in by the Allied forces of the British and American armies that are entering Germany from the west.
The riveting journey the group takes leads them through ravaged countryside, where they confront the horrors of a dying world while trying to find reasons to believe in the fundamental goodness of people. For the Emmerich family, it is an eye-opening trip as they come to the full realization of the horrors and atrocities to which their own people have subjected millions of innocent Jews --- a realization that changes them forever. To make matters worse, they are traveling during the winter months of 1945 and must battle the cruel elements as well as the uncertainty of what may happen should they encounter either the Soviets or their own German army (who they now must avoid because of both Callum and Uri).
The novel takes the reader through all of this, as well as depicting the face of war via the experiences of these personal encounters with fear and loss. It jumps between different narrators and also includes the story of a small group of Jewish women who are trying to survive in a Nazi concentration camp that is being evacuated. The lives of all the central characters eventually cross during an unforgettable finale.
Bohjalian handles the context of this story effortlessly and has created characters so engaging that any reader will find themselves connecting with these very real people. I particularly enjoyed the fact that he chose to tell it from a point of view rarely seen in WWII tales --- that of the families within Nazi territory. While the Soviet army may very well have been responsible for some war crimes of their own, the Emmerich family sees through the eyes of Callum and Uri that this was nothing in comparison to what their own army was responsible for.
The novel takes its title from a remark made by the Emmerichs' Uncle Karl, who finds himself unwilling to vacate his home during this mass exodus. Uncle Karl states: "These days, you and I --- our families, our world --- are nothing more than skeletons at the feast anyway." This simple statement of helplessness in the face of things beyond one's control is a poignant symbol of the sentiment felt by many of the survivors of WWII.
Some have compared SKELETONS AT THE FEAST to THE ENGLISH PATIENT. While there is definitely the element of romance here, the unflinching depiction of sexual degradation and murderous war escapades far exceeds the romantic ideals of stories like THE ENGLISH PATIENT. It is for this reason that I hail Bohjalian's new novel and its fearless account of one of the greatest tragedies of the 20th century.
--- Reviewed by Ray Palen
Book Review: Moving and Masterful Storytelling
Summary: 5 Stars
"Let's face it: these days, you and I - our families, our world - are nothing more than skeletons at the feast anyway."
These are the words of Karl Emmerich, a disillusioned aristocratic farmer whose foolish optimism has him believing that his societal standing will ultimately save him from the brutality of war, refusing to leave his home while all others are evacuating in an effort to escape certain death. His stubbornness would ultimately seal his fate, a fate that the innocent and guilty alike meet time and again in Chris Bohjalian's best-selling twelfth novel "Skeletons At The Feast". The book examines the ultimate toll of war through different perspectives during the last turbulent months of World War II in Germany and Poland, alternating between three vastly different scenarios.
The first is the Emmerichs, a family of six Prussian aristocrats. Rolf, the patriarch, and Mutti, his wife, are staunch canonists for their führer and members of the Nazi party. They own a prosperous farm in Kaminheim in East Prussia but they abandon it all in the wintry beginnings of 1945 as the Red Army begins to overtake Germany. While Mutti, her daughter Anna, her son Theo and Callum Finella, a Scottish POW, head for the safety and impregnability of American and British lines, Rolf and his teenage son Helmut answer the call of aid to their country, meeting the Russians head on as they push their way through the countryside, raping, pillaging and murdering all the way. The point of interest in this scenario lies mostly on the romance between 18-year old Anna and Callum, who met while Callum was forced to work on the farm with other POWs before their self-imposed evacuation. All the while that Anna and her family travel cross-country, the distant echoes of artillery fire can be heard and their small band has much to fear; the Nazis will kill them for their treasonous harboring of an Ally and the Russians will kill them simply for who they are.
The second is Uri Singer, a Jew on the run after having jumped a train bound for Auschwitz. In order to conceal his true identity, he commandeers a German military uniform and masquerades as a Nazi officer, all the while taking advantage of his supreme disguise and executing German soldiers and SS officers to sate his rage against the dire effects of the Holocaust.
The third is Cecile Fournier, a French Jew being worked to death in a labor camp. Bohjalian puts the reader right in there with her, bringing about harsh imaginings of malnourished physiques from slow and agonizing starvation, teeth rotting and falling out from poor hygiene and vitamin deficiencies, and clothes and shoes threadbare and falling apart from constant wear (not to mention the stains from loss of bowel control due to lax sphincter muscles, a side effect of rapid and extreme weight loss). Rather than fret on her own struggle to survive, Cecile instead focuses her energy and attentions on Jeanne, a fellow prisoner in the camp who consistently gives in to the hopelessness of the situation. All the while that they endlessly toil, they watch the Nazis beat and randomly shoot other prisoners and in one horrific instance, wheel two wagonloads of severely exhausted prisoners into raging bonfires, burning them alive. No expense is spared in illustrating the barbarity of the Nazis and the reader will feel Cecile's wrenching despair as well as the intense rage against her torturers.
All of the above characters eventually cross paths towards the end of the story, their fateful encounter shaping a tragic climax along with a bittersweet ending. The only inexplicable element of the novel's denouement is a minor character's mysterious placement in Israel as a soldier in the last chapter, an event for which the reasons and/or circumstances are never expounded upon.
Bohjalian's story is yet again inspired by real people and/or events, the journey of the Emmerichs derived from the diary of Eva Henatsch, grandmother of Bohjalian's close friends Gerd and Laura Krahn. Henatsch was a beet farmer in East Prussia before heading west with her family at the end of the war to escape the Soviets, a harrowing journey that she documented in impressive detail within her diary which spanned from 1920 through 1945. He also pulled from other amazing true stories, in particular from his neighbor Gizela Neumann, a Holocaust survivor (he attributes much of those stories to the character of Cecile).
Bottom line: "Skeletons At the Feast" proves that Bohjalian ascends to greater heights with each novel he publishes, his masterful storytelling placing him in the highest category of great authors of American fiction. Powerful and heartbreaking to the last, it will move you to read true accounts of the hardships of war as well as other amazing against-the-odds survival stories.
Book Review: Haunting
Summary: 5 Stars
I greatly admired Bohjalian's novels Midwives and The Double Bind. He has a very literary style and I find his writing to be very lyrical and beautiful, not to mention that his subject matter is innovative and thought-provoking. When I heard that he had a new novel coming, I knew immediately that I wanted to read it.
Though the two previous Bohjalian novels I had read dealt with quite diverse subject matter, this novel still came as a surprise. For as well as Bohjalian writes contemporary fiction, though, this work of historical fiction is even stronger. It's obvious that he did a great deal of research on the subject and his imagery is extremely vivid and graphic to the point that it is, at times, hard to read. This is not to say that the violence is gratuitous because it isn't. Bohjalian writes these scenes very matter-of-factly, which gives them all the more impact. Though this novel is fictional, what the characters face is based on facts and it is painful to imagine experiencing the things his characters experience.
Set in the waning days of World War II, Bohjalian tells the novel from several points of view. On one hand is the Emmerich family, landed gentry who are caught up in the Nazi regime. Though not entirely comfortable with this regime, the family is largely ignorant of the crimes against humanity being perpetrated by it. Bohjalian does an excellent job of portraying what many typical German citizens of the time probably experienced. It is very powerful to see how, once knowledge dawns, the characters begin to realize that the monumental crimes committed will long be their homeland's legacy.
The novel also introduces us to Callum, a Scottish POW who is sent to work the Emmerich family farm. His relationship with the family is complex. It would have been easy for him to classify them as heartless Nazis but he sees what type of people they are and how they have blindly trusted their leaders. Still, Callum is perhaps the least developed of all the characters.
The characters that resonated the most for me were that of Cecile and Uri. A Jewish woman captured in her homeland of France, Cecile is sent to a forced labor camp. Bohjalian provides many stark details of the deprivations and torture of these women as they labor and then march, their German tormentors leading them away from the invading Russian army. Uri is also a Jew but has spent the last two years changing his identity multiple times. In order to survive, he passes himself off as various German officers and even as a Russian. Uri's incredulity at the depth of the Nazis' hatred for the Jews resonates strongly and it is every bit as baffling for the reader to understand why, when faced with certain defeat, the Nazis continued to expend a lot of time and effort in their quest to exterminate an entire race of people.
Perhaps the strongest point of the novel is that all of Bohjalian's characters suffer. In fact, suffering is presented as a universal human condition and none of his characters are exempt, no matter their nationality or religious affiliation. It is indisputable that some suffer more than others but what is most striking about the novel is what it has to say about the human capacity for brutality against other humans--and the human capacity for love. The novel also contains a theme that could be called karma, for past actions come to haunt each of the characters in very serious ways.
This is a stellar novel from a very gifted writer, a writer who may just be one of the most talented American authors alive today. It is a profound, moving, and troubling novel that shows only too well how history does, in fact, repeat itself. One need only look at news of what is happening in the Sudan for proof.
Book Review: Just Misses Greatness
Summary: 3 Stars
I'm a huge Bohjalian fan. His greatest asset has been to get right inside the head of his characters so the reader is right there with him or her. Although this book had very good characters it seemed that this time Bohjalian, and therefore the reader, were observers rather than participants.
The book follows two groups as Germany is falling in the east to the Russians at the end of WWII. One is a family of Prussian aristocrats fleeing their home in Poland (which they as Germans never accepted) as the Russians advance. With them is a Scottish POW with whom the daughter has fallen in love. Later a Jew passing himself off as a German soldier as he looks for his family joins them. The other group is of female Jewish labor camp survivors being led west, again just ahead of the Russians. The privations of both are chronicled in detail and occasionally gruesomeness.
There is not much unique about the plight of the labor camp survivors. The depiction is graphic, but somehow, the reader can not get invested (everything cannot be Weisel's "Night").
The family and Uri, the Jew posing as a German who attaches himself to them, are much more unique. The slow realization of the mother and daughter as to why "we are so hated" is interesting to watch. Only when they cross paths with the labor camp victims do they truly understand. The life of Uri as he changes identities to stay alive would have made a great novel in and of itself. Here it is merely tangential but still interesting as he is faced with the conflict of dressing as SS to try and find his family (he escaped from a prison train and they did not).
There is plenty of guilt to go around. Uri feels guilty for leaving his family and masquerading to find them. The family takes it sweet time feeling the guilt it should have felt as Germans whose naivete allowed Hitler to go on without questioning by his nation. They are symbolic of the entire German population. The POW feels guilty for getting such a cush life out of the war (he never fired a shot and got hooked up with this family). But mostly, the book is about survival in a unique time in history from the viewpoint of the vanquished.
The book was a fairly unique way of making the common argument - the Germans chose not to see the atrocities going on around them until the Reich was falling. The author tries to bring the human element into it. These Prussians had a good life up until the end and had no reason to believe the rumors even when evidence of the atrocities was close by. Watching the light slowly dawn was interesting.
Bohjalian is a fine writer and the writing is very good. Somehow, though, I did not become invested in the characters even as good as some of them were. Although I enjoyed this book, I thought it just missed being something truly unique and special. It was good, but not great.
Book Review: A disjointed, dull, historical fiction account of a varied group of WWII refugees during a trek to safety in 1945
Summary: 2 Stars
The basics of the story, from the book jacket, are "In January, 1945...a small group of people...attempt to cross the remnants of the Third Reich..." The primary players are eighteen-year-old Anna Emmerich, daughter of Prussian aristocrats; her ten-year-old brother Theo; their mother Irmgard, known to most as "Mutti" (mother); twenty-year-old Scottish POW and love interest of the girl, Callum Finella; and twenty-six-year-old Wehrmact corporal Uri Singer, an Auschwitz-bound train escapee, who takes on a series of aliases and German uniforms and who travels with the Emmerichs after encountering them en route. Mr. Bohjalian tells the tale by alternating between the story of the Emmerichs, Uri (before their meet and while he is traveling separately), and a group of female Jewish prisoners. Additionally, he provides information about incidents leading up to Callum Finella's capture preceding his being employed by the Emmerich family. The characters sound intriguing and the story, compelling. But they and it are not. The author provides a lot in the way of questionable plot points and little in the way of character development.
At the top of the list of negatives is the "romance" part, specifically, the intimate encounters between Callum and Anna. They are excruciatingly explicit and verge on ridiculous at times, including one that ends so intensely that she (p 131) "had feared she was going to [urinate] on the rug at the edge of the ballroom." In another she imagines him as a horse. Other similarly explicit liaisons between the two don't fit the tone of the otherwise straight-laced story. Questionable behaviors by characters don't stop there. An elementary-school-aged child traveling in close proximity to family members chooses to and is successful at hiding a serious ailment from the rest. And a pair of starving Jewish prisoners devours enough found food for a feast, choosing not to wake a sleeping third to share.
There seems to be no end to references to prisoners wearing clothes covered by urine and feces. One is even forced to consume the menstrual blood of another. The author goes to great lengths to make most of the many deaths as gory as possible. Victims are pummeled until brain matter flies out, strung up by various body parts, and have their orifices stuffed with implements. Death is not pretty, but the author's handling of it is overkill at times. And defying the conservation of linear momentum (p 199) a gunshot victim was "lifted up and off the ground by the force of the [rifle and/or pistol] bullet..."
I feel the same about Bohjalian's departure from his usual non-historical fiction fare as Anna did about something in her own life (p 129) "It was a considerably more risky endeavor." The author was not up to the task. Better: Midwives by Chris Bohjalian, Suite Francaise by Irene Nemirovsky and The Book Thief by Marcus Zusak.