The Clothes on Their Backs

Hey there, i think that this was just a super read....the story leaves some things unsaid; that made me think for myself a bit. I highly recommend the novel.

I really loved this book with its sharp, incisive character studies & underlying exploration of how a wardrobe can reveal & conceal. The main character, Vivien, embarks on a search for her family history by talking with her father's estranged brother, Sandor, once convicted of being a slum lord. Sandor is a complex character - a slum lord, a pimp, a survivor of slave labor camps during WWII, an escapee from communist Hungary. He is by turns "the face of evil" & the soul of human kindness. I loved all the complex dualities captured in his character. Equally interesting is the underlying story of London in the '70's - punk music & the rise of the National Front. It's interesting to think about how frightening the skinhead movement must have been to those who had survived the first go-round with Fascism. This book is well written & literary without being overly conscious of its craft. The story is well-told, the characters fully realized and multidimensional. & the clothes - the joys to be had in costuming & re-costuming & all of the ways that clothes express who we are or who we wish we could be.

Just long-listed for a Booker! This book by Orange-Prize winner Linda Grant takes on several very complex questions. I think it gets ahead of all of them while building suspense about the characters. One big question dominates: what is a good person and what is an evil one? Not easy, but the choice of characters works well for it. The now-middle-aged narrator describes her father, mother, and uncle, whose different experiences with the Holocaust made them into very different people. But then, we see, they were different before that as well. So many issues of race and identity and self-discovery -- so little time! But as the earlier reviewer says, it all adds up to a good read.