Scan barcode
A review by shrutislibrary
The Storyteller by Jodi Picoult
5.0
"The person may have a scar, but it also means they have a story."
The Storyteller is a book that slowly enters your heart, makes a home in it and then leaves a black hole sized hole in your heart as the story begins to be told. This gut-wrenching, immersive historical fiction will sear your soul and have it for breakfast. Set against the backdrop of the pre-German-occupied Poland, and the subsequent horrors that unfold in the concentration camps at Auschwitz, the story is woven together with multiple fragmented strands of narrative, punctuating past horrors, present dichotomy and flights of imagination. Told from the perspective of the perpetrator and the survivor spanning across two generations - a grandmother and a granddaughter caught in the crossfires of history and its emotional scars imprinted on us.
The Storyteller is about the power of stories and the need to tell them. To ourselves. Our grandchildren. And the world. It is a story of a grandmother's painful recollections of her past suffering and a granddaughter who is a self-professed atheist, coming to terms with her unwanted share in history through her grandmother's horrific past.
The book left me feeling shocked, aggrieved, wistful, enraged, bitter, hopelessly agonised as Minka's first-hand account unfolds in elaborate passages that almost made me taste the death and wickedness hanging in the air at Auschwitz. Picoult writes viscerally leaving nothing to our imagination. I could smell and taste the warm, sweet cinnamon and chocolate laced rolls that Minka's father baked for her. The smell wafted from the pages of the book, transporting me to a dream world where anything is possible. Even though we may demonise and slay the monsters outside in the real world, there is one we must all grapple with and there's no escape from it. The burden of choice is on us as to how to end the story, which fate we want to this upior, this fallen creature to suffer. Can we ever truly forgive and forget the trauma of the past and love freely and believe in kindness again? These are the questions which we must answer for ourselves.
The Storyteller is a book that slowly enters your heart, makes a home in it and then leaves a black hole sized hole in your heart as the story begins to be told. This gut-wrenching, immersive historical fiction will sear your soul and have it for breakfast. Set against the backdrop of the pre-German-occupied Poland, and the subsequent horrors that unfold in the concentration camps at Auschwitz, the story is woven together with multiple fragmented strands of narrative, punctuating past horrors, present dichotomy and flights of imagination. Told from the perspective of the perpetrator and the survivor spanning across two generations - a grandmother and a granddaughter caught in the crossfires of history and its emotional scars imprinted on us.
The Storyteller is about the power of stories and the need to tell them. To ourselves. Our grandchildren. And the world. It is a story of a grandmother's painful recollections of her past suffering and a granddaughter who is a self-professed atheist, coming to terms with her unwanted share in history through her grandmother's horrific past.
The book left me feeling shocked, aggrieved, wistful, enraged, bitter, hopelessly agonised as Minka's first-hand account unfolds in elaborate passages that almost made me taste the death and wickedness hanging in the air at Auschwitz. Picoult writes viscerally leaving nothing to our imagination. I could smell and taste the warm, sweet cinnamon and chocolate laced rolls that Minka's father baked for her. The smell wafted from the pages of the book, transporting me to a dream world where anything is possible. Even though we may demonise and slay the monsters outside in the real world, there is one we must all grapple with and there's no escape from it. The burden of choice is on us as to how to end the story, which fate we want to this upior, this fallen creature to suffer. Can we ever truly forgive and forget the trauma of the past and love freely and believe in kindness again? These are the questions which we must answer for ourselves.