Easter is amsoabout baking, as my grand mother has been doing for decades for our big family. I added chocolate tasting to create and maintain our own tradition. Thanks to chocolate makers of Lindt, Sprungli, Laderach and Martel.
It was not a light reading, so be prepared to face it. I am in awe about Seierstad’s ability to tell us the story of a massacre in the heart of Norway committed by one of them. It takes maturity to take responsibility. It takes true compassion to pay all due respects to the victims and their families.
The story of this massacre is furthermost the story of young people who shared views of a better society, regardless of the background they came from. Until 22 July there was no sign they or their parents could see of an iminent danger of the being sacrificed to the “cause” a man created for himself. Unlike those he killed, “for Anders, dreams were not achieved through community. He wanted to shine out above the grey mass.”
How does one arrive at that? The testimony of the psychiatric doctor sheds some light: “‘The first time I saw Breivik enter this courtroom – and as psychiatrists first two or three milliseconds – it is important to note. I did not see a monster, I saw a deeply lonely man… Deeply lonely… Then quick as a flash he was inside his shell, making himself hard… But… At his core there is just a deeply lonely man. We have with us here not only a right-wing extremist bastard, but also a fellow human being who, regardless of what he has done to the rest of us, is suffering. We must try to put ourselves inside his brain, make his world comprehensible. His personality and extreme right-wing ideology are combined in an effort to get out of his own prison. He ends up ruining not only his own life but that of many others. We have with us here a fellow human being who will be left not only in his own prison but also in an actual prison. It is important for us to appreciate that this is something much more than a pure right-wing extremist. This is a tragedy for Norway and for us. I think it is also a tragedy for Breivik.”
Seierstad is equidistant to the tragedy of parents of the perpetrator and of the victims. And that is very noble in a society based on blaming the other. She let parents on both sides decide how much they wanted to be written about their children in the book. Because above all, this is a story of Simon, Anders and Viljar, Bano and Lara.
I read the book in one go. The novel is a take on the airplane hijack happening in 1983 in soviet Georgia. I was in kindergarden at that time in Soviet Moldova and obviously knew nothing about such brave people and most tragic events happening across the Black Sea. You had to be brave to undertake a plane hijack in USSR at that time. The group of young persons who undertook it in November 1983 had different personal and political motivations to embark on it. The loss of lives which it brought is telling of the methods the authorities used at those times. The storming by spetznaz of a plane where there were already wounded passengers, crew members and highjackers was part of “most humane justice system”. Same goes for a forced abortion of a young women arrested as a member of the group of dreamers who moved into action.
If you are looking for a recount of events, you might want to read the declassified files of KGB and other documents. This is a work of fiction inspired by events and the characters and their courage are romanticised. The stance of their parents, renown inteligentsia of Georgia, is depicted with a dignity that resonated with my parenting approaches.
To me the central character is the monk – Father Tevdore. He was condemned and executed for a crime he has not comitted, for actions he was not part of. It was very handy for the authorities to put the blame for such an anti-soviet act on a person of Christian belief. Father Tevdore – only 33 years old – took the blame in the hope that authorities will spare the younger people. He believed in humanity till the end and his last gesture of love was to arrange within the walls of the merciless prison for a last meeting between the newly weds of the group Tina and Gega right before the day of Gega’s execution.
I felt sad after having finished reading the book. Yet, these stories must be told and read, for this is how we stand a chance of remembering what matters most.
This is the second book by Asne Seierstad I read. “Two Sisters” is her sixth book. Released in Norway in November 2016, it became the bestselling book of the year, and won the prestigious Brageprisen.
The book is about the journey of two Somali sisters from Norway into the jihad in Syria. The author did a tremendous job to reconstruct the scenes as accurately as possible, which is not at all an easy task. In literary journalism the accuracy depends almost entirely on sources and in this case there were scattered, plentiful and fragmented. If you are interested in the methodology the author applied, read the post-face.
The “entire world is trying to understand the reasons for radicalization among Muslim youth” and this is the impetus of the book. As the author herself puts it: “There is no single explanation, but one can point to several factors, including the search for identity, meaning, and status; the desire to belong; the influence of others; excitement; the need to rebel; and romantic notions.”
Imagine waking up one morning and reading an email from your daughters saying “We have decided to travel to Syria to help out down there the best we can … . It was painful to read about the struggles of the father who travelled to Syria to bring back his daughters and who gave it up failure after failure of rescuing them. It was even more painful to read about how judgmental or indifferent humans can be in the face of a family’s tragedy. This book is a must-read for parents and guardians. As children grow and start interacting more with circles outside the family the vigilance must increase.
This is the kind of books I could read every day. It made me laugh and it brought tears to my eyes. I found it a touching, honest and humble ode to us, humans. The writing style is like a feather on a cheek, soft yet direct.
Lori Gottlieb arrived at therapy from the worlds of journalism and medicine. The stories of her clients, told with compassion, intertwine with solid references in the science of psychology. Lori’s personal story, with all its ups and downs, brings something many feel as missing in her profession – humanity.
I made a long list of take-away and come-back-to notes. Here are my favorite:
“In idiot compassion, you avoid rocking the boat to spare people’s feelings, even though the boat needs rocking and your compassion ends up being more harmful than your honesty. People do this with teenagers, spouses, addicts, even themselves. Its opposite is wise compassion, which means caring about the person but also giving him or her a loving truth bomb when needed.”
“People often mistake numbness for nothingness, but numbness isn’t the absence of feelings; it’s a response to being overwhelmed by too many feelings.”
“I once heard creativity described as being the ability to grasp the essence of one thing and the essence of some very different thing and smash them together to create some entirely new thing.”
“Not knowing is a good place to start,”…
“Most of us end up being the “good-enough” parents that Donald Winnicott, the influential English pediatrician and child psychiatrist, believed was sufficient to raise a well-adjusted child.”
“PEACE. IT DOES NOT MEAN TO BE IN A PLACE WHERE THERE IS NO NOISE, TROUBLE, OR HARD WORK. IT MEANS TO BE IN THE MIDST OF THOSE THINGS AND STILL BE CALM IN YOUR HEART.”
“…freedom involves responsibility, and there’s a part of most of us that finds responsibility frightening.”
“Talking can keep people in their heads and safely away from their emotions. Being silent is like emptying the trash.”
Flannery O’Connor quote: “The truth does not change according to our ability to stomach it.”
“The psychoanalyst Erich Fromm had made this point more than fifty years earlier: “Modern man thinks he loses something—time—when he does not do things quickly; yet he does not know what to do with the time he gains except kill it.”
“… ultracrepidarianism, which means “the habit of giving opinions and advice on matters outside of one’s knowledge or competence.”
“Everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms—to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances.” – Viktor Frankl.
Frankl’s book: “Between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom.”
“Take the case of a mother who came from a household with little money and who now admonishes her child every time she gets a new pair of shoes or a new toy by saying, “Don’t you realize how lucky you are?” A gift wrapped in a criticism.”
“Though we travel the world over to find the beautiful, we must carry it with us, or we find it not. —Ralph Waldo Emerson”
“The inability to say no is largely about approval-seeking—people imagine that if they say no, they won’t be loved by others. The inability to say yes, however—to intimacy, a job opportunity, an alcohol program—is more about lack of trust in oneself.”
“Just because she sends you guilt doesn’t mean you have to accept delivery.”
“I think of something else Wendell once said: “The nature of life is change and the nature of people is to resist change.””
“It’s one thing to talk about leaving behind a restrictive mindset. It’s another to stop being so restrictive.”
There will be an answer, let it be
Alaska. The Great Alone: Alaska – the great alone. Alaska: the great – alone. Alaska – the Great, alone… each reader will find his/her own understanding in this rich novel. I loved the plot, the characters and the style. I was looking forward to pickup my Kindle in the evening to keep reading it.
The story of a young woman married to an ex-Vietnam soldier who brought the hell in his mind to their marriage. Their daughter – thirteen-year-old Leni – is caught in the middle of her parents toxic relationship. In the hope of a fresh start, they move to Alaska. It is never easy to read about domestic violence. In this novel it is amplified by the harsh climate of Alaska, which is unforgiving: “A woman has to be tough as steel up here. You can’t count on anyone to save you and your children. You have to be willing to save yourselves.” Yet Hannah shows it to us from a survivors’ and not from a victim’s perspective. They find true friendship, love and finally – peace.
A painfully beautiful and beautifully painful story of love and division, commitment and betrayal, brotherhood and hate crimes, fear and renewal, hope and abyss, science and superstitions, and all – in couple of decades on one island. As Shafak herself puts it, this work of fictions is “a mixture of wonder, dreams, love, sorrow and imagination.”
Each character is a delight to get to know. The fig tree and the gentle way it narrates about what humans do not see and how it communicates with all living things around it. The Greek families and the Turkish families, and the impossible love between Kostas and Defne in 1974, separated overnight by war and reunited decades later, to become parents to Ada on British soil in London. I loved Ada’s superstitious aunt – Meryem and all her womanly advice to her niece. Yusuf and Yiorgos and their love. The Happy Fig tavern and its changing role for the characters. …
After having read the novel, I will never look the same way at trees and all those who re-planted their “roots” in foreign soil. I also wonder how much does humanity need to go through to finally learn. There is nothing to win in a war or from a division. There is no need to attack.
My favorite quotes:
“A map is a two-dimensional representation with arbitrary symbols and incised lines that decide who is to be our enemy and who is to be our friend, who deserves our love and who deserves our hatred and who, our sheer indifference. Cartography is another name for stories told by winners. For stories told by those who have lost, there isn’t one.”
“The bear knows seven songs and they are all about honey.”
“You must understand, whenever something terrible happens to a country – or an island – a chasm opens between those who go away and those who stay. I’m not saying it’s easy for the people who left, I’m sure they have their own hardships, but they have no idea what it was like for the ones who stayed.”
“I have never understood why humans regard butterflies as fragile. Optimists they may be, but fragile, never!”
“Knowledge is nobody’s property. You receive it, you give it back.”
“There was something childlike in the way grown-ups had a need for stories. They held a naive belief that by telling an inspiring anecdote – the right fable at the right time – they could lift their children’s moods, motivate them to great achievements and simply change reality.”
Love von Beauty von Love 
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