The character of the village, surrounded by ancient woodland, peopled by individuals who have been shaped into stubborn patterns of wordless defiance through grinding poverty and a system that took no account of the individual the anarchic effect of the newly-released market forces upon the towns and cities – all of this is rendered with extraordinary solidity and vividness. The physical and emotional landscape of newly-post-Communist Poland is evoked with astonishing clarity by Charles Powers’ beautifully turned prose. In the process Lesczek picks at a thread of criminality that causes the whole buried history of the village to unravel. A kind of literary detective story, it follows the attempts of his school friend, Lesczek, to understand how Tomek came to meet such a fate. The story begins with the body of a young man, Tomek, discovered in a clearing in the forest, his head brutally stoved in. It’s a book, above all else, about resilience. Set in a Polish village at the time of the collapse of communism, In The Memory Of The Forest is a novel about a community struggling with the burden of everything it would rather forget: the Jews who were rounded up and sent to Treblinka to be gassed the betrayals made by partisans fighting against the Nazis the surveillance of ordinary people under the communist regime and the everyday compromises that were necessary for survival in the face of enduring hardship. I would have loved to read more novel written by him. I'm sorry that Charles Powers only wrote one novel before he died. I found this title to be one of the most powerful aspects of the book and is only totally revealed until the reader has completed reading this novel. The forest is a powerful symbol in this novel and comes to represent many different things to many different people in the story. We also learn what communism has done to this village and how this affected the residents' lives. Where is the Jewish cemetery located in Jadowia? Where does Leszek's grandfather go every night and what is he doing?Īs these mysteries are resolved we learn the history of Jadowia during World War II - what happened to the Jews who lived there what Leszak's grandfather did in the forest and what he is doing at night now where the Jewish cemetery is located and what it means to one of Jadowia's residents, etc. Who brutally murdered Tomek, a young distillery worker and left his body in the forest? Who has been stealing the stones that have been used for foundations of the oldest homes in Jadowia, a small village in Poland. There are several mysteries that run throughout the novel. The novel takes place in a small town in Poland during the time Communism is being replaced by a new freely elected government led Leck Walesa as president. Powers' language and description is power and beautiful. When we were choosing books for our seniors book club, I suggested "In Memory of the Forest." Everyone in the group found this to be an outstandingly well written novel. I first read "In Memory of the Forest" ten years ago and it has remained one of my favourite books.
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