Literary Life | The Storyteller by Jodi Picoult | Review

I've been losing whole days to books recently, and I do not regret a thing. It started with Film 4 airing My Sister's Keeper, a film I try not to watch too much (for obvious reasons) but this time I found myself wanting to know the story behind the screenplay. I couldn't imagine how it was written and my curiosity needed satisfying. Sitting next door to the book I was after, stood a title that immediately pulled me in. The Storyteller is a title I have long been using as a way of describing myself and I was already intrigued by the idea of fiction within fiction.

 

In this case, there's certainly fiction within the framework of fiction, but there are hard to swallow facts embedded in there too. Picoult straddles a number of words and a multitude of characters in this novel. It is unusual to be reading about the Holocaust and the Second World War in a book that is not primary concerned with belligerent countries and the bloodiest of battles. As a graduate of a degree in both English and History, the books plays up to my interests on almost every level. I was reminded about a seminar I - somewhat unwillingly - sat through, on the purposes of the curriculum and whether too much attention is given to Hitler and the Third Reich. It was an atrocity of unspeakable terms; events occurred that I cannot even begin to imagine because my stomach simply could not cope with them. But although the Holocaust was, in some ways, an isolated event, the genocide of humans has been performed throughout history, all over the world. The Storyteller addresses one side of this argument. It argues that we must never forget the Holocaust but that we should not harbour it either. Essentially, it's a complex background that this book feeds into and where your opinion lies is up to you and no one else.

 

Picoult uses words to great effect, a trait she shares with Minka, the young Jewish girl who speaks fluent German and somehow survives the horrors of the war. She is a storyteller in her own right, not speaking of the sufferering she endured until her final years but rather vocalising the story she started as a teenager, about a young girl called Ania and her love affair with an upir; a monster within a man. Men are often seen as monsters in this novel, of varying degree, but none more so than Reiner Hartmann.

I had picked up, near the close of the novel, the variance of blood type. I knew therefore that the ending would be as I had imagined; Josef was in fact Franz, not Reiner. There was too strong a focus on siblings, on brothers, for it not to be the case. Knowing this did not diminish the ending because as the book so often attested to, something ending often meant something new would begin in its place. Franz had carried on the fictional tale Minka had begun. He too had weaved his own, a dizzying blend of the truth - horrors performed by his brother - which he marred into falsities. He wanted forgiveness for not saving his brother and sought it by becoming him. Not in reality, not in his image, but in memory. It was a clever plot twist which made for enjoyable reading.

Outside of the past we are invited into the present, mostly through Sage, a grieving, scarred baker. I  loved her relationship with Leo (almost as much as I loved Leo's relationship with his mother) and Rocco, Sage's haiku-speaking colleague, was a breath of clean, fresh air in a book full of loss and loneliness. There were a number of passages that I could have picked for my quote collection but I have opted not to list any of them. Partially because I simply couldn't pick one, but mostly because I implore you to read the book and select one yourself.