Emunah Elon

I’m done House on Endless Waters. As promised there was a big plot twist at the end. I still find the book puzzling. The MC’s mother lied to him his whole life about who he was. He began his life as a Jewish child in Holland. He escaped as a child with his mother and his sister. His mother made him promise never to return to Holland. He became a famous Israeli author and a few years after his mother died he agreed to go to Holland to publicize his latest book. And while visiting a Jewish Museum there, he saw a film clip of his mother and sister with a male child who wasn’t him. Spurred by that, he returns to Holland to investigate his origins and write a novel about it.
At that point the book develops multiple story/time lines. He is in Holland in the present - his mother and sister and the boy who is not him are in Holland in the past - and sometimes they are all there in a present/past blend. He has a interesting encounter in the present in Holland with his own grandson. He realizes that as an adult he has had a blind spot where children are concerned. That he pretty much ignored them until they were older. His grandson plays an important role in reconciling Yoel with his past. I would have liked to better understand why his mother made the choices she did and why she never wanted him to know the truth.… (mais)

Israeli author Yoel Blum has been avoiding visiting Holland all his life, part of a promise he made his mother, but when his novels are translated into Dutch he is persuaded to go there. He puts pressure on his older sister Hettie to tell him secrets his mother kept from him, and after the initial visit, he returns to Amsterdam a week later and takes up residence in an old hotel to begin researching what he plans to be his next novel, a story that evolves out of his origins.

An interesting novel about the treatment of the Jews in Amsterdam during WWII.

Elon is trying to do several things in the novel, as well as the history of the era, she is offering an insight into the creation of a work of fiction that may evolve out of a true story, and showing how one might choose to present/style a novel. As someone interested in creativity this would be of interest to me, but I wonder if it over weights an already weighty subject.

My other main criticism is that I can never keep Yoel in my head at the age he should be, a man in his 70s+. It's not a problem I have often.

That said, the Amsterdam described is an Amsterdam I recognise and have visited 7-8 times. She certainly gets the place right.

Because of other reading I was familiar with the history in Amsterdam in this era.… (mais)

The strongest part of this novel is not its descriptions of the Nazi occupation on a Dutch Jewish family, although they are quite strong, but the way it illustrates the creative process by which an author transmutes experience into fiction. Emuna Elon's protagonist, Yoel Blum, is a prominent Israeli novelist sojourning in Amsterdam, where he researches his own family history -- both to quell his own inner demons, and to use in his next novel, a fictionalized account of his own family's experience during the Occupation. The reader of Elon's intricately constructed novel witnesses Blum seeking out new experiences that enable him to get into the heads of *his* characters, even as those same experiences teach Blum much about himself.

4 stars....… (mais)