Children of Pithiviers

The writing is merely superb but the thinking is more than that. A short novel with a long agenda and complicated acting out. This novel is entirely finest kind and full enough of itself that satisfaction is at least as complicated. This is a book I will be giving to my friends.

This book is a complex and chilling investigation of the darkest human impulses. The writing is exquisite, but more importantly, Kohler makes us ask ourselves the hard questions--which is how I define moral fiction. I can't imagine it was Kohler's intention to put the seduction of Deirdre on a scale with the tragedy of the children of Pithiviers, but rather, to make us look at the nature of corruption and compliance, to force us to look in the scary places--and this she has done brilliantly.

This is a book for people who don't need to be spoonfed lessons in morality. Rather than drawing comparisons between Diedre's summer in Pithiviers and the horrors of the Holocaust, I thought the author's point was that the children imprisoned and gassed by the Nazi's clearly are the more tragic victims. And I admire the fact that she didn't think she needed to explain that to me. While Diedre almost willingly participates in her own exploitation at the hands of her hosts, the children who came before her had no options at all. Yet by showing us Diedre's more contemporary story, Kohler is able to lead us to the more horrific history of this region of France and suggest that while the two horrors are not equal, they exist on an unfortunate spectrum of abuse that continues to exist to this day. This is really quite brave and daring, and the writing is exquisite.