READ THIS: "The Guest Book"

I love recommending good books...and I'm thrilled to recommend a great one.  Here's The Guest Book by Sarah Blake, a stunning and sweeping novel exploring privilege and power, race and racism, loss and memory.  At its heart, though, is the problem of America, the choices made and not made, the sins unconfessed and carried along, generation to generation.  The mayhem done in the name of good manners and confidence.  

For friends doing critically important anti-racism work and insisting on anti-colonial projects here at home, Sarah Blake's storytelling invites deep reflection, into-the-night conversation and profound conversion.  Hers are not the musings of a hasty thinker or an impulsive one; instead she seems to insist on courage and action, while wondering if meaningful transformation is even possible.  Can we recognize the horrors we inflict--even and especially in polite society--and choose another course?  Can we truly accept responsibility (or 'response-ability') for the pain, suffering and damage we've done?

It's heavy stuff, to be sure.  But this is the work before us, she seems to suggest.  To truly remember (or 're-member') our past, to come to grips with our bigotry and prejudice, how deeply, deeply rooted they are in the souls and soils of America.

For instance, just a bit, just a taste:

In this scene, Paul has just returned from Berlin.  There, he's encountered Gunter Demnig's Stolpersteine Project, 600+ small brass squares recalling the names of Jews deported and murdered by the Nazi regime.  Each square is embedded in a street, a sidewalk, in a stretch of pavement where the kidnapped soul last lived.

"Before the Holocaust," Paul was explaining to Daryl now, "when someone tripped on a paving stone in the road, the folk saying went, A Jew must be buried there.  So the stumble stones take the old folk saying and make it literal."

He folded his arms, leaning against the edge of his desk.  "I had heard about the project but had forgotten it was there."

"Pavement stories," Daryl mused.

Paul nodded.  "Told all over the city."

Evie came to stand beside them.  Ranged in neat rows, a grid above their heads, the small brass squares reminded her of blocks of moveable type: Here lived, or Here workied.  Then the name.  Their birth.  The date of deportation, and last, of their murder.

"Those were the ones outside the flat in Schoeneberg where I was staying," Paul pointed to the top three, what looked like a family.

Heir arbeiteteArthur Kroner,JG 1874,Gedemutigt,Flucht in den Todd, 1941

Next to his block lay his wife: Heir wohnte Sophie Kroner, JG 1878, Gedemutigt, Flucht en den Todd, 1941; and beneath her parents, Mildred Kroner, JG 1925, Deportiert, 1941, Ermordert in Auschwitz, 1942.

"Here worked and lived Arthur and Sophie Kroner."  Daryl paused. 

"Gedemutigt?"

"Humiliated," Paul translated.  "And flown into death, 1941."

"Meaning?"

"They probably killed themselves rather than be taken."

...

At the end of the last row were the stones of what appeared to be another family: Here lived, Elsa, Gerhard, and Wilhelm Hoffman.  Evie read.  The father was taken first, in 1936, and killed shortly after.  The mother in July, 1941, and murdered in 1942.  And their son--she leaned closer.

"Yeah," Paul said, noticing where she was looking.  "The father died first, in Sachsenhausen, the mother in Plotzensee.  Those were the prisons in Berlin.  But look at that last one--the boy's."

"Ermordet Hier," Evie read.  Here.

"He was killed in front of his house on Linienstrasse, in Mitte, the heart of the city.  In the spot where I stood."

They stared up at the photograph.

"He was eleven," Paul said.

The ache in his voice was palpable.

"His was the one that got me.  I kept coming back to their stones--they had lived not far from the Institute--and the more I walked past his stone, around his stone, the more I wondered: Had anyone seen it happen?  Who?  I imagined the people in the street, who stood, as I was standing, maybe just a few feet away.  The man passing by.  The woman walking her dog.  The ones who watched people taken away."

Daryl had his head tipped, listening hard.

"So I started to imagine another group of stones to set in place beside the stumble stones around the city."  Paul pivoted from the photographs and looked at them.  "A stone for each watcher.  Stones for the crowd."

National Memorial for Peace and Justice, Montgomery, AL

Blake's story moves painfully across the 20th century, from anti-Semitism at home and abroad to racism in other forms, in other guises, on the American scene.  How do we unmask racism--in liberal circles, in financial and religious institutions, in every valley and city--and come to grips with privilege and its insidious costs?  Can we--like those Berliners--risk seeing, truly seeing, the bystanders in our histories: those who stood by as slaves were sold or whipped, others who accepted the slave trade as a necessary evil, accomodating that evil for the national project?  Again her interest is less in answering these questions than forcing the issue, inciting heartbreak and stirring meaningful repentance.  Who are we?  Who have we been?  And who will we choose to be?  Are we prepared to dismantle the house we've been living in, and build a different kind of home?

If you're looking for a story, a story that will shake you and ask something of you this summer, this might be just the one.  Sarah Blake's The Guest Book.  (And for all my friends, with Maine stories, with Maine summer stories...prepare to have your world rocked...and rocked hard...)