An Exclusive Love, by Johanna Adorján
Norton, January 31, 2011
When Johanna Adorján was 20 years old, in October 1991, her grandparents killed themselves in their tidy little house in a suburb of Copenhagen. This is their story, and it’s a love story.
In An Exclusive Love, Adorján explores her grandparents’ relationship, from their first meeting in Budapest in 1940 to their final days together, more than 50 years later. Her grandfather, István (known as Pista), survived internment at Mauthausen and Gunskirchen concentration camps during the Holocaust, while her grandmother, Veronika (Vera), who was pregnant with their first child when Pista was taken away, managed to obtain forged papers for herself and her son during the German occupation of Hungary, though her parents were executed. Pista and Vera later fled Hungary with their children during the 1956 uprising and lived the rest of their lives in Denmark. In this section, Adorján describes their early courtship:
Apparently my grandmother knew the first time they met that this was the man she was going to marry. Or at least, that’s how she often told the story. In the family we also know what happened between them next. It’s one of those stories retold so often that after a while you know it couldn’t have been different, it was just like that. A family legend. The two of them made a date to go for a walk. And after that they liked each other so much that they made a date to go for another walk. And then another. Each of them thought the other was crazy about walking. They were both entirely mistaken. When that point was cleared up after a while, it’s said that they were enormously relieved.
Adorján interweaves her own memories of her grandparents with the stories she has heard from their friends and family, bringing both of them vividly to life, but especially her proud and sophisticated grandmother. Vera combined a fierce and independent nature with an intense devotion to Pista, which grew out of her certainty that nobody else loved her as much as he did, and which resulted, finally, in her desire to follow him into death. In spare, unsentimental prose, Adorján recreates the day of their suicide: eating breakfast, taking their dog to the home of a friend (who believed they were going to Munich for a few days), bedding down their roses for the coming winter, counting out their sleeping pills. Though the end of this short, powerful book is no surprise, somehow it still feels shocking.
What are you reading today?
I am reading White Tiger by Adiga
I just finished a book yesterday. “You Know When the Men are Gone” by Sioban Fallon is a book of interconnected short stories that take place @ Fort Hood TX. Some of the stories are about the women who are waiting for their soldier to come home. A couple of the stories are about the men as they return home from Iraq. It gives great insight into what life is like for our military families.
Just started Wench by Dolen Perkins-valdez
I have been wanting to read that—please let us know what you think!
Windy City by Scott Simon – comedy written in 2008 about Chicago politics – fast & fun read so far & I’m only 100 pages into a total 400.
Desirable Daughters by Bharati Mukherjee. Ironic that one of the characters lives in Montclair, NJ, my home town!
I just read very thought provoking book recently,
“No Other Medicine” by a new author Gail Hallas, found her while bouncing around on Amazon books looking for something realistic but entertaining. Boy did I get what I was asking for. In one instance a five year old musical prodigy with a simple tonsillectomy get’s put in a room with a highly infectious kid by this arrogant doctor, the prodigy is in real trouble and the poor nurses are left holding the bag. Any wonder why big hospitals don’t want you to read this book and nurses do? Is this stuff really happening? Whoa!
The nurse reviews are incredible, what a read…Thanks
yeah for Hallas
The Tower, the Zoo and the Tortoise by Julia Stuart!
Starting “Left Neglected” by Lisa Genova the author of “Still Alice”.
I just finished “The Girl Who Kicked The Hornet’s Nest” by Stieg Larsson. I’m sorry that there are no more books in this series. Mysteries are not something I read very often, but I really got caught up in these stories.
I am just about to finish The Paris Wife by Paula McLain. I love this book. Paula McLain’s descriptions of the sights, sounds and even smells of Paris and Madrid are so vivid, you will feel as if you a part of this story instead of just an observer. And, if you haven’t yet read Hemmingway’s The Sun Also Rises, I can probably guarantee that it will be the next book on your TBR pile when you finish reading The Paris Wife.
I just finished reading Fall of Giants by Ken Follett.
I’m rereading Roughing It by Mark Twain. Just finished Ape House by Sara Gruen.
Reading ‘The Last Mercenary’ by Diana Palmer and listening to ‘Fire and Ice’ by Julie Garwood.