The Boston Globe from Boston, Massachusetts • N9

A 2 9 2 0 2 0 a Books N9 BOOKS: Do you read memoirs? MANTEL: Memoirs are the one case where persist despite a poor style if the writer has something interest- ing to say. I am interested in medi- cine and medical memoirs, such as Christie Language of She is a novelist but was a nurse. She writes exquisitely about her former profession. No by the neurosurgeon Henry Marsh is a frank, fierce memoir. BOOKS: When you read fiction what do you like? MANTEL: Literary fiction of all kinds.

I read a lot of first novels, hoping to strike gold. Look out for Naoise forthcoming ing uBIBLIOPHILES Continued from Page N8 a witty contemporary tale about a young Irishwoman at large in Hong Kong. BOOKS: Do you read historical fiction yourself? MANTEL: I like writers who have the confidence to show our forebears as alien. I enjoyed James ambi- tious novel, Calais, in Ordinary which has a thoroughly imag- ined fourteenth-century setting. I re- cently discovered Eugene twisty, terrifying novel, and which is set in the Irish countryside in 1885.

I like to learn from historical novels so I am an enthusiast for the Kingmaker se- ries by Toby Clements, which is set in the fifteenth century during the Wars of the Roses. BOOKS: What are the best nonfiction books read about the Tudors or Thomas Cromwell? MANTEL: The best Cromwell biogra- phy is by Diarmaid MacCulloch. I was instructed and deeply moved by Susan biography of Crom- friend, the poet Thomas Wyatt. Eric Ives wrote the classic biography of Anne Boleyn. BOOKS: Has your taste changed as a reader? MANTEL: entered a re-reading phase, so as likely to curl up with a Jane Austen as to read a new novel.

also entered a completist phase. read almost everything written by Anita Brookner, who has become undervalued. She is elegant and pol- ished as well as an acute observer. seeking out less well-known books by favorites like Elizabeth Bowen. re-visiting Edna early nov- els, and the crisp novellas of Jean Rhys.

BOOKS: Are there writers or types of books cooled on? MANTEL: a good thing I read a lot of Russian fiction in my teens, when I was very serious and very patient. I know if I would take to Dosto- evsky now. I would be asking myself what the translator was doing, and if I was really enjoying reading it. That was less of a question when I had all my life before me. Follow us on Facebook or Twitter Amy Sutherland is the author, most recently, of Penny and she can be reached at Heavily pregnant, Mary Rose moves into town with her daughter.

She feel safe on their isolated farm, but the phone calls keep com- ing: what happens to race trai- one asks; others just spew eth- nic slurs. Her husband blames her for opening the door; she grows to despise hatefulness and she noticed in him before. mother is deported five weeks after the rape: says the angry at- torney prosecuting Dale; Alma ez worked on a cleaning crew for years without anybody questioning her legal status until her daughter had the te- merity to get raped. The fact that Glo- ry was stupid enough to get into truck prompts many white Odessa res- idents to brand her a tramp and argue to dismiss the case we ruin a No wonder Glory refuses to appear in court. Mary Rose insists on testifying, and not just men who disapprove; asked not to come back to her Ladies Guild after she explodes when someone calls rape misun- Tightly wound Suzanne, who insists no as she re- peats unfounded gossip that uncle is blackmailing the Stricklands, is exemplar for the fear that underpins such anxious pro- priety.

Suzanne has pulled herself up from poverty via hard work and mar- riage to a supervisor at the ethylene plant, but still putting some of the proceeds from her Avon and Tup- perware sales in a secret bank ac- count. depend on a man to take care of she tells her daugh- ter. even one as good as your dad- Wetmore depicts a few decent men in addition to husband, in- cluding gentle uncle and a traumatized Vietnam veteran be- friended by Debra Ann. Yet even the good ones have a hard time taking off their West Texas blinders. Corinne, the oldest and bitterest of pro- tagonists, is still grieving the recent death of her husband, who emerges in flashbacks as a supportive, loving partner.

But she forgotten that she had to get his permission to go back to work as a teacher after their daughter was born, or that he said wistfully, wish you could be happy staying at Debra mother, Ginny, who abandoned her family on Feb. 15, voices the agonized conflict of all the mothers: loves her daughter, but she feels like sitting at the bottom of a rain barrel, and a steady drizzle filling it These interconnected stories play out against the backdrop of a harsh, lonely land lovingly evoked by Wet- more and space and quiet, the winter songbirds and the sharp smell of post as she mourns its de- spoiling by derricks and pump-jacks. not painting a pretty picture here, but palpably real, and her grit and resilience infuse the novel with a spirit of hard-won res- olution. The legal system fails Glory no surprise there but a form of rough justice is meted out elsewhere, enabled and protected by female soli- darity. is a gripping, galva- nizing tale from a strong new voice in American fiction.

Wendy Smith is a contributing editor at the American Scholar and reviews books frequently for the Washington Post. uWETMORE Continued from Page N8 ing ultimately to the views of heaven and hell that developed centuries later in the Christian In So- famous last speech, written in the fifth century B.C.E., Plato has So- crates claim that the soul lives on, im- perishable. Socrates argues that who think rightly should escaping the confines of their bodies by focusing on the welfare of their The Greeks had evolved a keen ap- preciation of ethics and individual choice, and with these, the corollary issues of equity and justice. Five hun- dred years later, Virgil delivers a ren- dering of the underworld that reflects a first century B.C.E. awareness.

Hell is a realm of cracking whips and drag- ging chains for those who die without confession; while for the good, there await fields of sport, singing, and feasting. Ehrman knows this territory as uEHRMAN Continued from Page N8 well as anyone writing today; the reader is struck by his nimbleness in drawing the thread of this rich-lay- ered narrative, sprinkling larger the- matic arcs with anecdotes that honor the non-lineal and multivalent nature of eschatological thought. As the Greek and Roman views evolved, the Old Testament notions of divine justice shifted as well. From the eighth century B.C.E. until the sixth, prophets were most concerned with the survival of the nation in the face of continuous invasion by the Babylonians and Per- sians.

Isaiah 26:19 promises that God would return to bring his Is- rael back to life. When a victorious kingdom did not come about, the idea of a Cosmic Evil at work in the world was born. The world was controlled by forces of evil, but God would ulti- mately triumph on the Day of Judg- ment, ushering in a new Kingdom for his faithful. This was the theological climate in- to which Jesus was born. An Apoca- lyptic, like many at the time, Jesus predicted that the Day of Reckoning would occur in his generation, and in- volve the full resurrection of the body.

When the predicted reckoning did not occur, his followers had to reinterpret his teachings. It was precisely during this interval that the visions of the afterlife we hold today came into their own as a literary phenomenon. Over time, the Day of Judgment was replaced by a vision that rested exclusively on rewards and punishments that would begin immediately at We owe many of our lurid, fantasti- cal images of heaven and hell men hanging by the genitals, women cast neck deep into pits of excrement to the Roman satirist Lucian of Samosa- ta. The of a sec- ond-century Latin text by a 22-year- old convert to Christianity, describes dream-visions of heaven beyond her impending martyrdom. The synchro- nous of details bodies aflame, worms devouring en- trails, and lightning piercing the eyes of mothers who kill their infants.

The cast of characters is vast and entertaining. There is Saul, arriving in disguise at the home of the Medium of Endor, a woman whose wizardry he had outlawed years earlier. Desperate in the face of an enemy army and the upstart, David, he seeks contact with his deceased counselor, Samuel, who the Medium produces through a ance. There is the pseudonymous 1 Enoch, in which of came to earth and impregnated women, producing giants who wreaked havoc by eating everything in sight (includ- ing humans), before God sends a flood to destroy them. And much more.

Ehrman suggests that the intent of the prophets and fabulists were of a piece: not to impose the terror of death, but a concern for living a virtu- ous life. He repeatedly hopes that his study will offer and com- to an anxious world. In the pro- cess, he ably enlightens and enter- tains. if we do have something to hope for after we have passed from the realm of temporary conscious- he writes, have absolutely nothing to Kathleen Hirsch teaches at Boston College and blogs at kathleenhirsch.com. By Julia M.

Klein GLOBE CORRESPONDENT here are heartbreakingmoments in Esther about her obses- sive quest to uncover the details of her immigrant Holocaust history. How could there not be? After surviving against terrible odds, her mother and father strug- gled to reconstruct their lives amid unimaginable losses. And Foer her- self had to deal with their silences and erasures, inheriting a trauma that has rippled through her life. Want You to Know Still is her attempt to tame that trauma and fill in the gaps of her past. As the events themselves recede, the rich literature of second- and third-generation Holocaust mem- oirs continues to grow.

But the ter- rain it charts including the inevi- table journey back to the Old Coun- try to find traces of a vanished world and mourn the dead has become increasingly familiar. ram- bling, repetitive narrative, marred by pedestrian prose and a profusion of mundane details, is, at best, a mi- nor contribution to this burgeoning genre. Born in Lodz, Poland, Foer spent her early childhood in a displaced persons camp in Germany, the daughter of two Holocaust survivors who grew up just miles apart and married in 1945. She is, more fa- mously, the mother of three best- selling writers, Jonathan, Franklin, and Joshua Foer, all of whom have tackled their heritage in varying ways. The most notable is Jonathan Safran award-winning 2002 novel, Is a fictional account of his collegiate pil- grimage to Ukraine that became a 2005 film.

Want You to Know Still interweaves Esther per- sonal history with accounts of her mother and father, as well as a con- fusing plethora of other relatives and minor characters. to- gether the fragments of my family story has been a lifelong Foer writes. One doubt it. But the result remains fragmentary, perhaps deliberately so. Central to narrative are two mysteries of identity: What cou- rageous family sheltered her father during the war and thereby saved his life? And who exactly were her first wife and daughter, both murdered in the so-called Holocaust by Bullets in present-day Ukraine? Her father, Louis Safran, a savvy businessman in his postwar heyday, could have provided the answers.

But, perhaps because of the linger- ing emotional fallout of the Holo- caust, he took his own life when Foer was just 8 years old. As a result, she writes, remains an that she must work to penetrate. Her discovery of his poignant sui- cide notes is the emotional climax, more shattering even than her trek to Ukraine. For years, mother, Ethel Bronstein, an inveterate coupon- clipper who remarried and lived un- til 2018, revealed little. child- Foer writes, filled with silences that were punctuated by oc- casional shocking among them the existence of her fa- previous family.

About her own travails, Bron- stein repeated only a single, heart- wrenching anecdote, about her sis- ter, Pesha, running after her as she was leaving home to offer a pair of shoes. Bronstein never said goodbye to her own mother, with whom been quarreling, and never saw anyone in her immediate family again. In later interviews conducted by US Holocaust Memorial Museum volunteers and others, Bronstein of- fered details about her home town of Kolki, Ukraine (then Poland), and her flight east with a girlfriend. Like many Polish Jews, the two women traveled, mostly on foot, to the Cen- tral Asian republics of Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan to wait out the war. Returning to Kolki afterward, they encountered a survivor who related the sad fate of their relatives, all murdered.

In the case of her rescuer, Esther Foer had one good clue: a fading black-and-white photo of four people. She gave it to her son Jonathan when he traveled to Ukraine. He came up empty, but his subsequent novel elicited contact from survivors from her home town of Trochenbrod. The In- ternet, DNA testing, and sites such as Ancestry.com also helped her connect with cousins and others known her father. A big breakthrough occurs when a new friend, collaborating on a doc- umentary, locates people he believes to be descendants of her res- cuer.

Esther Foer, with her son Franklin in tow, travels to Ukraine in 2009 to confirm the discovery. On that same trip, she also visits a mass grave near Kolki and joins others with Trochenbrod roots to look for traces of that vanished town and memorialize its dead. A self-professed hoarder of and Foer stuffs Ziploc bags with mementos from these various sites, and leaves mementos of her family behind. much of my adult life I have been haunted by the presence of she writes. Her homely dirt collection is one at- tempt to address that absence.

Foer also cites an idea, which she credits to Columbia University pro- fessor Marianne Hirsch, that ited memories traumatic frag- ments of events defy narrative re- disjointed memoir, with its abrupt time shifts and obsessive recitation of the names of the dead, seems to exem- plify that dictum. Julia M. Klein, a cultural reporter and critic in Philadelphia, has been a two-time finalist for the National Book Critics Nona Balakian Citation for Excellence in Reviewing. Follow her on Twitter Looking at the different ways we view the afterlife We owe many of our lurid, fantastical images of heaven and hell to the Roman satirist Lucian of Samosata. A story of love and fury in West Texas Hilary Mantel on reading and re-reading I WANT YOU TO STILL HERE: A Post-Holocaust Memoir By Esther Safran Foer Tim Duggan Books, 240 $27 A memoir of heartbreak and horror.