Bookshelf:

The Red Magician

It's been another quiet week this week. Well, okay, my fantasy baseball team seems to be making its move this week (I'm currently in 11th place out of 16), but that still qualifies as "quiet", I think!

I did actually read a whole novel this week: Lisa Goldstein's The Red Magician, which is the book for next month's book discussion group at Kepler's. Of course, it's a very short novel: 190 pages of large print type. Then again, for this story that turns out to be about the right length.

Kicsi is a young teenaged girl in a Jewish Hungarian village in 1943. The village is shepherded by a powerful rabbi who works magic and keeps a tight rein on his flock. One day, a red-haired man named Vörös comes to town and stays with Kicsi's family. Kicsi soon falls for him, in her young-girl way. Vörös is a magician, who's come to town to protect it from a coming disaster, but he makes an enemy of the rabbi and is driven away. The disaster, of course, is the arrival of the Holocaust, which blasts through Kicsi's village and life like a steamroller.

The book is straightforwardly - almost simply - told, and in some ways is not much more sophisticated than many other stories of the Holocaust which have been written. Such stories are always a bit difficult to judge: On the one hand, the Holocaust was such a heinous event that one can't argue with the publishing of another story denouncing it, because such stories carry meaning beyond their intrinsic fictional goals. But separating out the fictional goals is more difficult because of this. Is it original? Is it good? Hard to tell. For instance, I thought the movie Schindler's List was a pretty mediocre film, and I'm not even sure if I'm in the minority!

The Red Magician sidesteps these matters slightly by being mainly about Kicsi, Vörös and the rabbi: Kicsi's particular struggle with survival after the war, her fascination with Vörös' abilities and place in the world, her desires for her future and how they come true, and the rabbi's twisted view of Vörös. It's a little bit coming of age story, and a little bit cautionary tale. But in a sense it's light fantasy and dark fantasy rolled into one, told in the style of a fairy tale. And enjoyable read, and I'm curious to read some of Goldstein's other work (some of which I've added to my Amazon wish list).

Not a lot to report otherwise. I bought my plane tickets for my vacation next month - cheap! Took my car in for scheduled maintenance. Went to gaming night last night. Picked up this week's comics. Pretty mellow. This weekend will be busier.

Only other thing to mention, I think, is that it's finally warm enough here in California to wear shorts. Of course, it's supposed to cool off again tomorrow. And Mom reports that it got up into the 80s in the northeast last week. So maybe that's not so exciting after all!