Klik op een omslag om naar Google Boeken te gaan.
Bezig met laden... The Betrayal (2010)door Helen Dunmore
Bezig met laden...
Meld je aan bij LibraryThing om erachter te komen of je dit boek goed zult vinden. Op dit moment geen Discussie gesprekken over dit boek. Helen Dunmore's plot is so powerful an idea that the book drives itself - it is almost a thriller - centered around Stalin's post-war Leningrad and a doctor who gets given the case of the son of the head of the NKVD. It is written in a literary style that is rewarding and easy to read. Dunmore knows her chosen period and drops small details in with ease. The writing is powerful and quite sparse. It is certainly one of the better novels I have read this year. post war Communist Russia say nothing — invisible — still many spies — good In 1952 Leningrad, Andrei, a young doctor, and Anna, a nursery school teacher, are forging a life together in the postwar, post-siege wreckage. But they know their happiness is precarious, like that of millions of Russians who must avoid the claws of Stalin's merciless Ministry of State Security. When Andrei is forced to treat the seriously ill child of a senior secret police officer, his every move is scrutinized, and it becomes painfully clear that his own fate, and that of his family, is bound to the child's. Trapped in an impossible game of life and death, and pitted against a power-mad father's raging grief, Andrei and Anna must avoid the whispers and watchful eyes of those who will say or do anything to save themselves. This is the sequel to the author's magnificent novel The Siege, which I read last summer. It is the early 1950s, towards the end of Stalin's long rule. Siege survivors Anna and Andrei are now married and living with Anna's now teenage brother Kolya. Anna is a nursery school teacher and Andrei still works in the hospital in Leningrad that he kept attending even in the bleakest mid-winter days of the terrible siege. Andrei's professional life is thrown into turmoil when he is asked to advise on a case of a child's swollen leg. This seemingly minor event turns out tragically both medically and politically, for the child is the only son of a senior official in the Ministry of State Security, the forbidding S I Volkov, and many medical personnel are reluctant to get involved, the Hippocratic oath being perverted by the all-pervasive fear of becoming involved in any way with the secret police. The child's swelling turns out to be a tumour and he has to have his leg amputated. Later secondary cancer turns up in the boy's lungs and it is too late to save him. Volkov's natural horror as a parent is compounded by the political authority he possesses, and both Andrei and the surgeon who operated on the boy, Dr Brodskaya, are caught up in the maelstrom. Brodskaya is Jewish and the novel's plot mirrors the horrible real life events of the last months of Stalin's life when, in the so-called Doctors' Plot, a number of doctors, most of them Jewish, were arrested and charged with the medical murder of several top Soviet politicians who had died in the previous few years, including Andrei Zhdanov, Leningrad's leader during the siege. Andrei finds himself suspended from duty and later arrested and taken to the notorious Lubyanka in Moscow. Anna, pregnant with her and Andrei's child, struggles to find help on the outside but retains her freedom and takes refuge in the countryside with an old family friend. After a final meeting in prison with Volkov, who tries to persuade Andrei to sign a statement that he was hoodwinked by Brodskaya's "plotting" to cause his son's cancer to spread, Andrei is sent to the gulag in Siberia, not far from his home city, Irkutsk. The novel ends with Volkov's suicide as his son lies dying, followed by Stalin's own death. Anna faces the future with a little more hope than Andrei will eventually be released from the wrongful charges in the somewhat more liberal atmosphere (in real life, the arrested doctors were released very soon afterwards). This is another brilliant novel from Helen Dunmore.
Onderdeel van de reeks(en)
Leningrad, 1952. Andrei, a young doctor, and Ana, a nursery school teacher, know their happiness is precarious. When Andrei treats the child of a senior secret police officer, it becomes painfully clear that his own fate, and that of his family, is bound to the child's. Geen bibliotheekbeschrijvingen gevonden. |
Deelnemer aan LibraryThing Vroege RecensentenHelen Dunmore's boek The Betrayal was beschikbaar via LibraryThing Early Reviewers. Actuele discussiesGeenPopulaire omslagen
Google Books — Bezig met laden... GenresDewey Decimale Classificatie (DDC)823.914Literature English & Old English literatures English fiction Modern Period 1901-1999 1945-1999LC-classificatieWaarderingGemiddelde:
Ben jij dit?Word een LibraryThing Auteur. |
This family sees the danger ahead of them, but in a society that fosters nothing but fear, there is no place to hide. You can walk the line carefully, but the danger is real and about you always.
There’s no protection in making yourself small and hoping to become invisible. All you do is make yourself small.
Having survived the Siege, the war, the starvation and the specter of death on every park bench, the world they now inhabit might be even more threatening and frightening. At least when the Germans were attacking the city, the enemy was known, identifiable. In post-war Leningrad the enemy could be a neighbor who wants your larger apartment, a colleague who wants to escape scrutiny himself, or someone you don't know who simply takes notice of you and learns your name.
Why do we think that the present is stronger than the past? They are not even separate. The past is alive, waiting. She and Andrei turned away from it because they had to, but it only grew more powerful. Part of her will never leave that frozen room.
Anna is living in a world that expects, in truth, demands, that she bury her past in a fictional account that is rosier; that she deny her hardships and the struggles of those she loved, because to acknowledge them is seen as casting an aspersion on the government or the system. The horror of the past seems to be over, but horror is horror in whatever form it takes. Life is a tight wire, balanced above a precipice, and all it takes to make the walker fall is a gentle wind.
What they face and how they struggle to survive is laid out in the starkest prose, with a fear that is palpable. I not only felt the fear, but the helplessness, the inability to know who to trust, the need for everyone to say and do only that which would save themselves, if they could even decipher what that might be. There is no rhyme or reason, and a lie that is an impossibility can convict you as easily as a truth. This is an entire country of citizens living with the peril of betrayal, with such an uncertainty that it is miraculous that anyone dreamed to survive it.
( )