Another war story for the year. The Postmistress by Sarah Blake is about a wife who is waiting at home for her husband to come back from war and the letter that is never delivered to her.
The start of this book felt a bit erratic to me, but I am glad I finished it. I think I need a break from war stories.
Excerpts from the book:
All there was was the story she had told, not what happened around the edges.
Life seemed to her like a city hotel with many floors. She did not like to think of all the hallways she'd never seen, nor all the hallways that she might have walked along if she had gotten off at a different floor. She didn't like to think that there was more than one hallway than the one she was in...
When we know there are people in need, right now, in the same breath as what we are breathing, we cannot look away. It is no abstract. We have to go. That is humanity. The whole thing relies on it. Human beings do not look away.
One day someone you saw ever day was there and the next he was not. This was the only way Frankie had to report the Blitz.
...The Jews were being interned because they were Jews, and were being denied refuge on the basis of being Jews.
...he'd come to understand that each one of us was alive, intensely alive, right until the instant of death. And then each of us was gone. There could be no substitutions.
When the Germans come they will simply come, and there won't be an announcement.
We can't change what is coming. Something is always coming.
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