Mayra Calvani did an incisive interview with me some months back. She also reviewed Down to a Sunless Sea quite favorably. Her site is darkphantom.com and she now freelances at Today.com. A novelist and reviewer, she is the recent author of a book on reviewing on blogs. I asked if she might review The i Tetralogy, cautioning her as I often do with reviewers about the graphic and very disturbing aspects of the book, telling her to read the autobiographical essay at the end so as to determine my writerly aims and intentions.
In private correspondence she recently shared how disturbing the book was for her, how she found it difficult to sleep and how the book became so much for her at times that she had to go away from it. Nevertheless, she felt the book had to be read. I shared with her that the book had cost me psychologically as well, that a book like this one comes but once to a writer in his or her lifetime; that I doubted I would ever near its intensity ever again or come upon such insights as I did into human behavior. In fact the book intimidates me! It is hard to work on the next book having such a shadow cast upon my efforts.
Calvani’s review is at http://booktalkcorner.today.com/2009/01/22/not-just-another-book-about-the-holocaust/. If I typed this incorrectly just go to her site. I want to quote some of her words because she is the best reader of this book so far:
“I have chosen to review this book in the first person instead of my usual third, if only because it shook me so deeply. Freese shows humanity as it is, in its own raw and naked reality. He does it with bluntness, yes, but with incredible insight. His sentences flow like the blood that gushed from ther victims’ veins during this terrible event — relentless and ruthless. The protagonists reveal themeselves to the core, from the deepest corners of their minds to the bottomless misery of their hearts. I found myself taking breaks between readings. I had to. Immersing myself in this story was killing me a little every time. This is without a doubt the most terrifying book I have ever read, and not because of its callous bluntness, but because it made me realize what human beings can be capable of. ‘To ask why there is evil in this world is to ask who we are.,’ writes Freese (343). I think this sums up the essence of the book. It also brings up the question: is the bystander who watches and lets it happen less guilty than the murderer?”
A very gutsy woman — and reader. The rest of the review contains this kind of intensity.
When I had completed the first novella, i, I shared it with a social worker who had survived Auschwitz. I did not know that. One evening she called me and said: “What part of the camp were you in?” I broke down . I then went on to write three more novellas. Calvani’s review has impacted me in a different way as well. I know I have done my task and I have been truthful to my purposes. No amount of fame, money or accolades can match or equal the value I have received from touching another person who senses my sensibility and who reads my work as if every page counts.
On a slightly tangential note, often reviewers — I should say bloggers — complain that my book of short stories is too dim, dark or desperate; that if they read such a book they want an “Anne Frank” moment, as I call it. That false, surreal belief that for every dark moment there has to be one of light. The shallowness is appalling, expressing the inability to see the species and individual people as they are, not as one might want them to be. Anne Frank has been ripped-off, for she wrote her book not in a camp but in a hidden room. Some do not consider her book as part of Holocaust literature. Her thoughts are turned to “sweeten” the Holocaust because human beings — and that means you and you — cannot cope with their own hearts of darkness. And believe me, you have one. I have seen it as a living person and I have experienced it as a psychotherapist. Many of us live lives of quiet desperation, playing ducks-and-drakes with life, skimming the lake waters.
Kudos to Mayra Calvani for not fleeing from the light.
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