"How long can a war last?" This question—metaphorical, physical and above all, emotional—sits at the heart of this brief novel by Chessman (Lydia Cassatt Reading the Morning Paper
; Ohio Angels
), centered around Hannah Pearl, a French-born World War II survivor now residing in a Connecticut nursing home, where she is increasingly prey to memory loss. The author uses Hannah's condition as the starting place for a series of finely crafted meditations that blur the lines between past and present, English and French. This technique allows for many melancholy confusions. Hannah's ongoing encounters with unrecognizable yet familiar family members convey a quiet, heartbreaking grace as they digress into memories of loss undiscussed for years: Hannah's departure from France as a teenager in the 1930s, the loss of her family in the Holocaust, her marriage to an Englishman, his death in the war. Hannah's daughter, a museum curator, and her granddaughters, a young mother and a college student, write and visit, but cannot penetrate the fog in which Hannah is lost. Chessman creates a lovely if precious world filled with snapshots, letters and internal dialogue, but the gradual fading away of the protagonist leaves a hole at the book's center. Agent, Amy Williams.
(Sept.)
