Interview with MADELINE ASHBY

Today I talk to debut novelist Madeline Ashby about robots, Japanese anime, cyborg theory, writing and the distant dream of sleep…

Book Tourism: Toronto, Canada (+Book Haul)

So, last week I was in Toronto for Alyssa’s Spring Break. It was my first time in Canada, and I must say I really liked Toronto. It was very easy to see why film companies love to film there – it really can double for Anywhere, North America really easily. It was also because of this fact, I think, that I felt comfortable and relaxed there – it was oddly familiar. Not only that, but the atmosphere and temperament of the Canadians seems to be much closer to my own. All except the passport control official, who was surprisingly aggressive with his questions [my trip was bookended by aggressive, suspicious border agents, sadly].

Anyway, let’s bring things back to what this post is really about:

“Far To Go” by Alison Pick (Headline)

Reviewed by Alyssa

A compelling and thought-provoking novel

The story of one family’s epic journey to flee the Nazi occupation of their homeland in 1939, and above all to save the life of a six-year-old boy.

Pavel and Anneliese Bauer are affluent, secular Jews, whose lives are turned upside down by the arrival of the German forces in Czechoslovakia. Desperate to avoid deportation, the Bauers flee to Prague with their six-year-old son, Pepik, and his beloved nanny, Marta. When the family try to flee without her to Paris, Marta betrays them to her Nazi boyfriend. But it is through Marta’s determination that Pepik secures a place on a Kindertransport, though he never sees his parents or Marta again.

Far to Go is inspired by the author’s own grandparents who fled their native Czechoslovakia for Canada during the Second World War.

In Far to Go, Pick has created a complex and compelling work. The novel alternates between the historical narrative following the Bauer family, and the frame of a present-day first person narrator grappling (personally and academically) with the legacy of the Kindertransports. At first, the relationship between these two narratives is not apparent, but as the novel progresses, we begin to see more and more clearly how they are connected. While the historical portions are stronger than the frame narrative, Far to Go is nonetheless an impressive novel.