From: lhendr at unm.edu <lhendr>
Date: Thu, 8 Apr 1999 10:21:57 -0600 (MDT)

I, too, just read Looking Back all in one fell swoop, and ended up with tears in my eyes. I found the photo album approach and the structure of the book fascinating, and I'm still trying to figure out if there is a pattern to the structure. What I can see is that themes are linked (and partly linked through the epigraphs from the books), and there is a back and forth between distant past and more recent past, and that all gradually moves toward more recent events. Somehow it feels like a dance, or a musical composition with recurrences of themes and variations. I found especially intriguing the juxtaposition of photos of Lowry and her mother at various ages, and I think the moment that touched me most was when she imagined talking to her mother after her son's death, so that they could compare their feelings and how they coped with the loss of their adult children.

        Interestingly, the author whose work this most reminds me of is Penelope Lively, who also wrote a book entitled Looking Back, and who in many of her books emphasizes the interleaving of time past and present, giving a sense that all time is really one time. She does the same kind of thing in her Booker Prize-winning adult novel Moon Tiger, in which a woman on her death bed relives her life, but not in chronological order, and in her own autobiography, Oleander Jacaranda (another great autobiography!), in which she returns to her childhood home in Egypt and simultaneously sees the house as it was in her childhood, and the house as it exists in the present.

        I wonder how much the non-linear structures of Lowry's book and Lively's books reflect new ways of seeing, new ways of thinking about time (or perhaps a going back to nonwestern conceptions of time), and the influence of modern technology -- the kinds of things Eliza Dresang talks about in her Radical Change.

        Lobel's book, on the other hand, which I found one of the most powerful autobiographical accounts of holocaust experiences that I've ever read, tells her story chronologically, with, except for the instances mentioned, no overlay of looking back from the present. Very different feelings are evoked by the two ways of telling.

        When Lowry shows the glamourous picture of her sister in her bathing suit at age 18 and tells us that in 10 years she would be dead of cancer, she is overlaying that photograph with the knowledge of hindsight. Lobel, however, tells her story matter-of?ctly, as it was lived through the eyes of a young child, and part of its emotional impact is that as knowing readers, we know more than the child narrator does about the full horror of the experience -- the kind of experience Ruth refers to as not knowing until it is all over how horrible it was. This also raises interesting questions about how differently child readers of various ages, or, for that matter adult readers with varying knowledge will read the account.

        Lobel's book (I haven't seen the photos), reminds me most of Aranka Siegal's incredible Upon the Head of a Goat. It seems almost unbelievable that both of these women could survive their horrendous childhood experiences to become such beautiful, creative, amazing and whole women. Another book I found to be very powerful, but that seems to be little known, is Ilse-Margaret Vogel's memoir, Bad Times, Good Friends, which tells of the experience of a young German woman living in Berlin during the war. It is told in brief vignettes, and reveals a side we seldom hear about -- what life was like for ordinary Germans during this terrible time.

Linnea

Linnea Hendrickson Albuquerque, New Mexico Children's Literature: A Guide to the Criticism (1987) at: http://www.unm.edu/~lhendr Lhendr at unm.edu
Received on Thu 08 Apr 1999 11:21:57 AM CDT