Exploring the role of history in our lives

Narrated backward by six-year-olds in four generations of the same family, Fault Lines begins in California circa 2004, with the scarily distant voice of Sol, a precocious boy who surfs the Internet for porn and plays along with his mother’s delusion that he is too young to watch Bridget Jones’ Diary.

We are taken to the crux of the story with the visit of Sol’s grandmother Sadie, a world-renowned authority on Jewish affairs. We learn that Sadie is a passionate advocate of the Jewish cause, but Huston keeps delaying telling us why, until two chapters down the line, when we hear Sadie’s childhood voice from 1962.

Sol’s father Randall, whose voice we hear in the second chapter, was raised in a devout Jewish household. His parents take him to Israel in 1982, where Sadie collects material for her work. The central theme of the novel is the effects of the Lebensborn (“fountain of life”), a Nazi organisation set up to provide families for “racially suitable” kids from occupied territories and raise them as Germans. Sadie’s mother Kristina — the narrator of the final chapter — was one such child, taken from Ukraine as an infant and raised by a loving German woman. Kristina, however, was “rescued” and relocated to a Ukrainian family in Toronto after 1945.

Huston writes movingly of the role of history in our lives — how the past is not just a memory, but an affliction that seeps into the blood and gets passed on to subsequent generations, its effects unpredictable and unquantifiable.

FAULT lINES
Author: Nancy Huston
Editor:Sheela Reddy
Publisher:Grove Press
Pages: 320
Price: $ 14