Caroline Brothers

(8.5) I think this is the first book I have read set in Argentina and I realise I had little or no knowledge of its history.
The story opens in Buenos Aires in 1976. There has been a military coup. People a wary as to who they can trust, as seemingly innocent people are disappearing. Osvaldo is a surgeon who enjoys drawing cartoons. One evening he is gathered with friends and draws a cartoon lampooning the current military regime. His friend Hugo is a newspaper editor and wants to publish it . He will write the byline to accompany it. Osvaldo is uncertain of the wisdom of this, but Hugo convinces him that his paper is of little consequence and it is unlikely to come to the attention of the authorities.
the day following publication he receives an urgent call from Hugo warning him that the authorities are coming for them. Osvaldo flees to Europe with only his passport, leaving behind his wife Yolanda and youngest daughter, Graciela. His other daughter is married and lives in Miami.
Not long after, Graciela's fiance, Jose, also disappears and Graciela goes into hiding. Yolanda spends countless hours assisting Jose's parents in their search for what has become of their son. A few months later a friend tells Yolanda that she witnessed masked men taking Graciela and her flatmates.
Meanwhile Osvaldo has to work as a drug rep as his medical degree is not recognised in France. He is tormented by guilt for not only his foolish actions but for leaving his wife and daughter alone.
The story moves through the next twenty years, spans continents and Yolanda discovers that Graciela was pregnant when she was abducted, so now there is a potential grandchild to find as well.
I was shocked at the barbarity of the treatment meted out to those that were abducted. The bookis an accomplished piece of writing, compassionate, informative and I kept wanting to return to it.… (mehr)

I stumbled on this book quite by accident when I was checking Goodreads to see if Steven Lang’s new book Hinterland was there, and discovered this one with the same title, by Australian journalist Caroline Brothers, who is living and working in the UK and Europe.

Hinterland is a remarkable book. This story of two brothers on an odyssey across Europe to find a home in the UK where they have human rights pulls at the heart strings, all the more so because it is based on an awful truth. Of the hordes of refugees descending on Europe and the UK, hundreds are unaccompanied minors. In the back of the book where she tells of the genesis of the book, Caroline Brothers explains how her characters Kabir aged eight, and Aryan aged fourteen, are a composite of children she has met and who told her their stories.

The story begins as the boys cross a river into Europe on a journey that began in Afghanistan. Escaping the Taliban, they have made their way through Iran and Turkey, and are now at the unwelcoming border into Greece. They have nothing but the two layers of clothing on their backs, clothing which is needed for the nights when they have to sleep out in the open. This odyssey means that they are often unimaginably cold, hungry and dirty, and always terrified of being caught and sent back.

To read the rest of my review please visit https://anzlitlovers.com/2017/05/14/hinterland-by-caroline-brothers/… (mehr)

The Memory Stones tells the story of a family fractured by the Junta in Argentina’s Dirty War. I knew someone who was a reporter, who worked who Jacobo Timerman and had terrifying stories of the war to share. Those stories were what drew me to Caroline Brothers’ novel that begins with the coup and continues forward to the end of the century.

In the Dirty War, some 8,000 people disappeared in Argentina, many of them young, college-students. During that time, some 500 children were born to those prisoners without names in cells without numbers (to borrow from Jacobo Timerman, the most famous of those prisoners). Those children were taken, adopted my people in the military of sent to other countries. They disappeared and only now, with DNA testing, are people finding these lost children of the war, reuniting them with their grandparents usually, since most of their parents were murdered by the Junta.

This is the story of Osvaldo, who drew the ire of the junta by sketching a cartoon caricature that a friend published in his paper. It was early days and they had no idea that this coup would become a killing machine. He fled into exile, but his wife stayed behind. Their daughter was missing and they assumed it would settle down. It never did and his daughter was never found.

The story is so much about Yolanda, his wife, and her determination to search and find Graciela, their daughter. It is about his struggle for information from outside Argentina, the helplessness of being in exile, the loss and separation from his wife and daughter. It’s also about the reality that the fixed anxiety over the missing daughter makes the safe and sound and living in Miami daughter feel like chopped liver.

Yolanda learns that Graciela was pregnant and her approximate due date. Clues and small snippets of information are collected. Life goes on, tragic, hopeful, quotidian, dramatic, just life. This novel, of grandparents seeking their granddaughter, hoping for truth about their daughter, for looking to build a new life after such a massive fracture, is fascinating, intriguing and sometimes heartbreaking.

I cried far too much through The Memory Stones. I cried when Yolanda sees a girl playing in a school yard and thinks it is possible she is her granddaughter, though mostly through intuition and hope, not based on evidence. I cried when Brothers devoted a short chapter to the letter Yolanda wrote to her parents, following it as it fell on the floor, was thrown outside, blew about in the wind, was rained on, run over and disappeared in running ink and pulp. I actually thought to myself, “You are crying over a piece of paper.” Yes, I really did cry over a piece of paper. Paper that represented an at-the-buzzer shot toward the basket of hope. And that is the miracle of The Memory Stones, that despite all the reasons for despair, hope kept pushing it way to the surface, flourishing, fed by memory and love.

The writing in The Memory Stones is beautiful with rich imagery and wonderful meandering interstices like the story of the letter. It is written by someone who loves life, beauty, and the promises of love and family. There is no prurient attention to the gruesome and the hateful. While there are stories told from the prisons and by people who were held by the Junta and tortured, they are told out of a need for truth, not out of fascination. This is a heartbreaking story, over and over and over again, but like the best of stories, there are moments of grace, joy and hope that more than compensate for the sorrow.

I received an e-galley of The Memory Stones from the publisher through NetGalley.

http://tonstantweaderreviews.wordpress.com/2016/09/24/the-memory-stones-by-carol...… (mehr)

The Memory Stones by Caroline Brothers leaves quite an emotional impact The emotional impact is all the greater for the story is set in the history of Argentina's Dirty War. Caroline Brother's writing transports the reader to the places she describes, from Buenos Aires to Paris to Mexico City and to Greece. More than that, the writing transmits to the readers the emotions of the characters and puts the reader into the middle of the story. A memorable book.

Read my complete review at http://www.memoriesfrombooks.com/2016/08/the-memory-stones.html.

Reviewed based on a publisher’s galley received through NetGalley.… (mehr)