August 12th, 2008
Review – Fault Lines
“Fault Lines” is an interesting book. Presented in four sections going back in time, each section is twenty years after the next section, the book creates puzzles about the characters and then slowly reveals the answers as their past is revealed. Each section is presented as written by the parent of the child who wrote the previous section until the final section is written in 1944-45 by the great grandmother of the writer of the first section.
The story presented involves an aspect of Nazi history rarely written about and the author does a nice job of linking the sections together. But each section of the book is supposed to have been written by a six year old and the writing makes this unbelievable. Right from the start, we are presented with a character, Sol, who at six years old likes to look at videos of beheadings and rapes. He doesn’t chew his food but lets it soak in his mouth and is overly concerned with his bowel movements. His oddities make him unbelievable and completely unlikeable but worse his behaviors are unexplained. Each of the other voices are from children who have been damaged but the reasons for their damage is part of the puzzle that is revealed as the story unfolds. The other three children, although not sounding like any six year old, are at least sympathetic. And each section also discusses a piece of history: the war in Iraq, the massacres in Sabra and Shatila in Lebanon, the Bay of Pigs (why is the US sending pigs to Cuba?), and finally the bombing of Dresden.
If you can get past the narration by these adult six year olds, there is an interesting story here. There is a unique humanity to the characters (other than Sol) that makes the book hard to put down. It is worth giving a try. I will add that the final section of the book was by far the best. It made me interested in finding a novel about life in Nazi Germany from the viewpoint of a child.
