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Monday May 26, 2008 Edition
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Bohjalian’s Latest Book Is Out


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Monday May 26, 2008

By Dale Piper

   Local author Chris Bohjalian has done it again!  His latest novel, Skeletons at the Feast, hit the stores on May 6 and is more than well worth the read.  A major detour from the Bohjalian novels that we are most familiar with, this one is not set in Vermont, or even New England for that matter.  The story takes place in the fragmented and fluid Germany/Poland/Prussia region toward the end of World War II.

   The seeds for this novel were sown several years ago without Chris even knowing it.  A friend asked him to read a diary that a relative had written, chronicling, among the more mundane narratives of home and farm life in the 1940s, the vivid description of refugees  making the grueling trip west in order to stay one step ahead of the Russian forces in 1945.  In the years since, Chris read a couple of novels portraying this slice of history and, recalling the diary, he revisited it and saw a novel in the making.

   In the book we follow the Emmerich family, well-to-do Prussian farmers, as they realize that they must leave their home and land in order to avoid the Russian onslaught bearing down from the east.  We see the tightly knit family take separate paths, as the patriarch and two sons are conscripted into the German military and the mother, daughter and youngest son depart for the west, along with a Scottish POW that had been sent to work for them on the farm.  Along this journey we not only see the horrors of the war unfold, we see the individuals evolve: the Emmerichs, a German Jew who has successfully escaped from a transport train to Auschwitz, a Frenchwoman, also a Jew, who endures forced labor under the Reich and others.  Some prevail and some succumb.

   The horrors of this period in history are presented frankly and clearly, but not gratuitously.  As usual, Bohjalian has done a masterful job.  Perhaps the best and most descriptive analysis of his style is a quote from the San Francisco Chronicle, “Bohjalian's hallmark: ordinary people in heartbreaking circumstances behaving with grace and dignity.”  This book has all of that in spades.

   He will be at the Vermont Book Shop in Middlebury on May 24 at 11:00 a.m..  To see the rest of his book tour, and more, log onto www.chrisbohjalian.com.   

 


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