Book Club: Sarah's Key

Hey fellow readers!  This is the first entry of our Book Club.  Leanna's choice to kick off the club was Sarah's Key by Tatiana De Rosnay.

 

 Joshua:

As I read this novel I kept thinking about the twists and turns feminism has taken.  What came to my mind during Julia's decision to keep her baby at the abortion clinic was how similar in sentiment that scene was to Juno.  In both instances, the audience is asked to identify with strong female characters, one a 40-something journalist, the other a brash and witty high school student, who in a sense affirm their female empowerment through a commitment to motherhood (or quasi-motherhood, as Juno gives up her baby but retains a relationship to the child). 

          

Another observation: I imagine that when the author set down to write this story, after doing her research of the Jewish roundup in Paris and the deportation of thousands of men, women and children to the death camps, she began by working her way backwards from the ending.  That ending, of course, is that the protagonist's child will bear the same name as the Jewish child Sarah Staryzinski, who's horrific story we see unfold in the early chapters of the novel.  In making the decision to link names child to child, the author creates a subtext that suggests that humankind's collective guilt over the Holocaust can only be overcome if another "holocaust", abortion, is ended.  Perhaps it wasn’t the intent of the author to make such a comparison, but Julia’s pregnancy saga made it kind of unavoidable, at least for me.

I think the story would have been stronger if it had developed in a less formulaic way.  The negative parallelism between present and past, one child who is killed and another who is saved (or the parallelism between Sarah and Julia herself), is contrived to be highly engaging on an emotional level.  But I found that neat and tidy mirror-imaging kind of disruptive to the seriousness of the events; in the last few pages I kept waiting for the reveal of the name in much the same way as one reading a murder mystery.  The historical events described here may have been better served by a narrative structure more open ended, in which the reader is made to contend with his or her own morality a little bit.  Telling the story more through the eyes of Bertrand's family, who moved into the Staryzinski apartment and in a real sense benefited from the round up of Jews in Paris, may have been one way to accomplish that.

That is my two cents.  What say you, dear wife?

Leanna:

 

I like your summary, but I find it interesting how differently we saw this book and how differently we perceived the author's motivations.  We certainly agree that the book was written to not merely tug at the heart strings, but to rip that sucker out of your chest like something directly from the Temple of Doom.  [You know I'm not a big Indiana Jones fan and I sure as heck am not taking the time to fact check myself, so I hope I got the right movie, if not, just go with it anyway.]  The whole sub-plot about Sarah's pregnancy and the pressure from her philandering husband to end it really didn't evoke much emotion from me.  When the author takes us down the road of a possible miscarriage, quite frankly I didn't really care what happened to the baby.  Writing that makes me feel kind of heartless.  I love babies and all, but it just didn't do it for me.  That said, when Julia was in the hospital and Bertrand had rushed to her side, I was hoping for their relationship to survive.  Though he was a little rough around the edges, I don't think that Bertrand was the jerk that I think the author wanted us to perceive him as.  If he was supposed to be the villain, it didn't work for me.  I didn't hate him.  As a matter of fact, I kind of felt sorry for him.  I could imagine what it would feel like to have your life flipped upside down by an unexpected pregnancy.

 

As for the Nazis and the French police involved in the round up, I do hate them.  Of course I hate the Nazis.  I hate that women and children were murdered at the hands of the government they trusted to protect them.  I was far more wrapped up in the historical story line.  The author very successfully kept me hoping, no matter how irrational that hope was, that Sarah's little brother was going to be alive inside that apartment when Sarah and her adoptive parents arrived.  The image of her finding his dead, decaying body starts the waterworks for me.  There is something so sad about that little innocent victim who will never be memorialized.  His name will never be listed in a book of Holocaust victims.  However, maybe, thanks to his sister, he was allowed to perish while still innocent, naive.  He didn't witness the horrors she saw and he wasn't burdened with the demons she couldn't shake.  So perhaps, Sarah did successfully save her brother.

 

So dear husband, there you have it.  That's my side of the story.  :)

UP NEXT FOR THE BOOK CLUB :  Zadie Smith’s novel On Beauty