NONFICTION: MEMOIR
History of a Suicide: My Sister’s Unfinished Life by Jill Bialosky
In the two decades since her half-sister Kim took her own life at age 21, Jill Bialosky has become a poet, novelist, book editor and mother. But Kim “was a phantom always near me,” Bialosky writes in her memoir, “History of a Suicide.” “I allowed her death to possess me.” Her book is an effort to rid herself of this burden: “I had to understand why she would take her own life and whether I could have stopped her,” Bialosky explains. “Maybe in doing so, I could forgive myself.”
Searching for catharsis — even absolution — is a dangerous pursuit. But with the help of her sister’s personal writings, her own memories and a forensic psychologist, Bialosky makes a valiant and eloquent effort to capture her sister’s inner life. The portrait of turmoil she creates is both chilling and familiar to anyone who has known a depressive.
Bialosky’s mother was a young widow with three children when she met Kim’s father, a dashing drinker with a temper. Kim’s birth, when Bialosky was a teenager, did little to solidify a faltering marriage that had turned violent. Kim’s father doted on his daughter until she was 3, when he left. Bialosky’s mother suffered bouts of depression, and her young daughters filled the void.
Bialosky’s thoughtful book elucidates the complexity of suicide, yet the image of that elusive father and the yearning daughter hovers powerfully over the narrative. “Dear father, Why won’t you be my dad?” Kim wrote in her journal, echoing the sentiment of Sylvia Plath’s poem “Daddy,” which appears a few pages later. In the years before her death, Kim got involved in bad relationships with men and overindulged in drugs and alcohol. The reader can sense Bialosky trying not to blame Kim’s father. Perhaps that is the ultimate lesson of this book: the futility of post-mortem culpability. As the eminent suicidologist Edwin Shneidman tells Bialosky, “It’s not about spinning the bottle of guilt and seeing where it lands.”
NONFICTION: HISTORY
Odessa: Genius and Death in a City of Dreams by Charles King
Odessa has always been a study in anomalies: A multilingual port in what is now Ukraine, long dominated by Russia, it occupies the old site of a Tatar village that was conquered by a Spaniard and administrated by a Frenchman in service to Catherine the Great. During World War II, the city was largely populated by Jews and controlled by Nazi-allied Romania.
After a Holocaust-era ethnic cleansing, in which most of Odessa’s 180,000 prewar Jews were either slaughtered or forced to leave, the Soviet Union retook Odessa. Soviet leaders recast it as the birthplace of revolution, the site of the mutiny of the Battleship Potemkin, as crystallized in the famous Sergei Eisenstein film, which was barely grounded in reality. By that time, according to Charles King, the author of this new portrait of Odessa, it was a denuded city, too weak to assert its real identity behind the powerful state-sanctioned myth. With the city having lost much of its historic importance as a commercial port and a gateway to the Middle East, King believes that Odessa is now mostly in the business of nostalgia.
In the West, we mainly know Odessa as the birthplace of people who left it — mostly Jews, from the writer Isaac Babel to the Zionist Ze’ev Jabotinsky to the denizens of Brighton Beach. As the violinist Isaac Stern once pithily described the Soviet-American cultural exchange, “They send us their Jews from Odessa, and we send them our Jews from Odessa.” The original Odessa, the old-world metropolis whose economic power served to protect its unusual ethnic melange, did not last long. The particulars of the city’s founding and early history, as conveyed here, are dry. King occasionally brings his story to life with famous visitors and residents, such as Alexander Pushkin and Babel, but he would have served his tale better by giving a fuller sense of the life of average Odessans.
As it is, the book comes alive only when the city is engaged in mythmaking, particularly when King writes about the filming of “Battleship Potemkin,” or in general suffering, as in a horrifying section on the little-known fate of the Jews. After World War II, Odessa’s Jewish identity lived on in legend, but no longer in fact.
FICTION: BALKAN CONFLICTS
The Tiger’s Wife by Tea Obreht
Tea Obreht’s swirling first novel, “The Tiger’s Wife,” draws us beneath the clotted tragedies in the Balkans to deliver the kind of truth that histories can’t touch. Born in Belgrade in 1985 — no, that’s not a typo — she captures the thirst for consecration that a century of war has left in that bloody part of the world. It’s a novel of enormous ambitions that manages in its modest length to contain the conflicts between Christians and Muslims, Turks and Ottomans, science and superstition.
The story, which demands a luxurious stretch of concentration, works on two levels that initially seem unrelated but eventually wind around each other evocatively. In the present day, the narrator is a young doctor named Natalia, who travels 400 miles on a “goodwill mission” to inoculate orphans at a monastery in a town now separated from her home by a new border. Just as she arrives, she gets word that her beloved grandfather, also a physician, has died while coming to help her. His death is not a surprise — she alone knew he had cancer — but the circumstances strike her as odd.
This activity in the present is only the novel’s skeleton; the meat of the book is supplied by the lyrical stories Natalia remembers from her grandfather. These tales take place in a time of isolated villages inhabited by craftsmen, traveling peddlers and healers. That “The Tiger’s Wife” never slips entirely into magical realism is part of its magic — its agile play with tragic material and with us — because, despite Natalia and her grandfather’s devotion to science and rationality, this is a story that bleeds into fable with the slightest scratch.
Two semi-mythical characters dominate her grandfather’s reminiscences, stories flecked with macabre humor that sound at times like Balkan versions of Isaac Bashevis Singer. One is “the deathless man,” the nephew of Death himself, who came originally to heal but eventually to carry the souls of the deceased to the other side. The other character is a deaf and mute woman, who befriended a tiger in the woods. Natalia claims that “everything necessary to understand my grandfather lies between two stories: the story of the tiger’s wife and the story of the deathless man,” but his relationship to these mysterious characters yields only more evocative questions.
