Ambassador of the Dead

In a compelling story, told poetically, Melnyczuk, takes us on a gripping journey. Along the way, he illuminates the path of Ukrainian families, post WWII, coming to America to begin again. The minefields of history, stuggles with being "other", ghosts of those who never made the trip and rigid standards enforced within a community of immigrants will be familiar to many from other places, other devasations who attempted to start new lives in the USA.Beautifully told, this is the tale of a young man coming to terms with a tragedy worthy of the Greeks, playied out in a run down New Jersey apartment that is his best friend's home. While suffering to find a place for himself in the New World, the narrator, Ned Blud, must make sense of the lives intertwined with his own-lives both complex and mundane but etched in the chaos of loss.We are asked to pomder the place of the past in forging a future, the obligation of children to the grief of parents, the sacrificess, as well as, the benefits of assimilation and the strength of the individual within and without community. Finally, however, the question that Melyyczuk demands we answer is what role memory plays in being human.

We are each a storehouse of the accumulative pain that we have experienced, handed down to us by our parents and other significants -- how we recognize, view and process that pain draws the boundaries of the way in which we live our lives. Some people have a tougher time dealing with their past than others -- and when, as in the case of Nick Blud, the narrator of Askold Melnyczuk's dark, rich and extremely moving novel, that pain is multiplied by the suffering endured by his parents and grandparents, it's an almost insurmountable task. To make matters even more difficult for him, his parents -- Ukranian immigrants who have made a new life in America -- are reluctant to give many details about what they experienced in WWII in their homeland. This novel chronicles Nick's journey inward and backward to fill in the gaps in his family's past and come to terms with them. There are several characters in the novel who are making this journey -- and, indeed, aren't we all, to varying degrees? Each of them has their own discoveries to make, their own ghosts to exorcize, their own truths to define. Some of them are up to the challenge -- and some of them fail in devastating ways.The mood of Melnyczuk's novel is dark -- but the writing is very rich, expressing the desperation and hope, the pain and joy, the terror and exultation in which his characters are awash. The emotions here run strong and deep, and they are honestly -- at times brutally so -- portrayed. A premise is expressed toward the end of the novel -- and this isn't a spoiling revelation, don't worry -- about the nature of darkness and light in our lives: 'Death, a writer once observed, is the dark backing a mirror needs if we are to see anything'. We need one in order to know and appreciate the other.I found the novel to be modrately compelling for the first 100 pages -- then it picked up steam and held me unrelentingly in its grip for the duration of the story. The characterizations are full, developed vivdly, and memorable. This is one of the more unusual tales I've come across in the last year or so -- very entertaining on one level, and very instructive on another. I'll have to check out the author's earlier novel, WHAT IS TOLD -- I'm extremely impressed with the skills and style he has shown in this book.

The narrator of Askold Melnyczuk's masterful novel, a successful physician, thinks that to a large extent he has escaped the past - the troubled lives of his Ukranian immigrant friends - and become successfully assimilated into the American dream of upward mobility. In the course of the novel he learns that the past is not like the pages of a photo album that you can leaf through when the spirit moves you; rather, it lives within you, influences and molds you, whether you want it to or not, and can spring out at you, like a tiger crouching in the bushes outside your sunny suburban home. A difficult theme, and Melnyczuk handles it well.