L'amore, d'improvviso

Ernest is a Red Army veteran, a former partisan and a communist who gave up his Jewish identity while fighting the Nazis. For him the Soviet army must have been a way to fight back, but during the war he also turned into a communist. This meant turning his back on his religion and identity. It is no Leggi tutto

I love this book cover, it exemplifies the story so well. This is a quiet and introspective book featuring two people that are so different. Ernst, who disclaimed his Jewish roots when he was young, was a veteran of the Red Army in the Ukraine. He was a communist who persecuted the Jews. Now at the

The title is misleading. Yes, this is a love story, but the love that develops between Ernst and Irena is not sudden nor is it romantic. As he is dying, Ernst discovers “a reservoir of living water within him.” Irena’s devotion to him is “the gateway to life.” Observing her serenity... her living life Leggi tutto

What makes this short novel special is its portrayal of a fresh sort of relationship, between two people — an educated man in his 70s and an uneducated woman in her 30s — with apparently opposite relationships with dead parents that have limited their lives in different ways. Their relationship brin Leggi tutto

This novel is written with few characters and a relatively spare setting. The effect is a tightly focused novel drawing subtle lessons and parallels. Silence plays the role of shadow character, distilled into the shape and weight of human history. For some, silence is the language of the sorrowful. F Leggi tutto

Ernst is a 70-year old Jewish man, a refugee from Europe, living in Israel several decades after World War II. Back in the 1930’s in Romania, he was a strident young communist who had rejected his family and his heritage. As part of the revolutionary vanguard, he and his young comrades torched “bour Leggi tutto

As I read this story I felt as if I was trespassing, a voyeur witnessing two souls find an accidental love. Their love is unspoken but understood, a silent intruder without premeditation. Every gesture is noted and understood, no interpretation required. Two people so dissimilar but so much a like.

After I've read it again I might give it a 5th star. I tried a previous book by Apelfeld and couldn't get into it. This I read in one sitting. It is such a sympathetic laying out of the two characters-- a 36 year old maiden lady and the 70 something scholar for whom she keeps house. Their secrets are Leggi tutto

This is the story of an older man, Ernst, and his young, simple, devoted caretaker, Irena, who helps him reconnect and make peace with his past. In all honesty, I hated--HATED--this book when I first started it. Both characters are incredibly extreme--Ernst in his ridiculously rigid way of viewing t Leggi tutto

BOOK REVIEW: 'Suddenly, Love': Love Really Does Conquer All REVIEWED BY DAVID M. KINCHEN Amor Vincit Omnia: Shortly before the start of the first millennium, the Roman poet Virgil (70 B.C.- 19 B.C. most famous as the author of the "Aeneid" ) wrote "love conquers all things; let us too surrender to