Fic­tion

Sonata for Miriam

Lin­da Olsson
  • Review
By – December 22, 2011

Adam Anker, born in Kraków, lives in an island house set above the sea. On the oppo­site side of the world, on anoth­er island, lives the moth­er of his daugh­ter, a woman he last saw twen­ty years before. Like the blank space between them, Adam’s life is marked by blanks, spaces nev­er filled in because Adam has no answers to the ques­tions they ask, only silences. Now, at six­ty, pro­pelled by grief and a pho­to­graph in the Auck­land Holo­caust Gallery, he leaves his New Zealand home on a jour­ney that will take him first to Kraków, then to the remote Swedish island where he made the deci­sion that took him halfway around the world. 

On the nar­ra­tive lev­el, Sonata for Miri­am charts Adam’s quest to fill in the blanks that war left in his life. But the nar­ra­tive shifts in time and shifts in per­son as it shifts in place, in truth a vehi­cle for the two nar­ra­tors, Adam and Cecil­ia, to give shape to lives con­struct­ed around silences and loss­es cre­at­ed by love and cir­cum­stance — the blank spaces. Oblique, mov­ing, writ­ten with great and rich pre­ci­sion, Olsson’s nov­el is less Adam’s sto­ry than a sto­ry of how men and women man­age the lives that both they and forces beyond their con­trol have made for them.

Maron L. Wax­man, retired edi­to­r­i­al direc­tor, spe­cial projects, at the Amer­i­can Muse­um of Nat­ur­al His­to­ry, was also an edi­to­r­i­al direc­tor at Harper­Collins and Book-of-the-Month Club.

Discussion Questions