The Madonnas of Leningrad: A Novel (P.S.) | Debra Dean | Love, survival, and the power of...

The Madonnas of Leningrad: A Novel (P.S.) | Debra Dean | A MUST REA

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The Madonnas of Le...

	The Madonnas of Leningrad: A Novel (P.S.) Debra Dean Harper Perennial, 2007 - 256 pages average customer review:based on 73 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

Love, survival, and the power of imagination

I work with older adults who are in the early stages of Alzheimer's disease, one of the most dreaded possible outcomes of aging. The people I work with certainly have problems with their memories, especially short term memory, but they continue to enjoy conversations, reminiscing, music and art. I would like to think their journey is like Marina's, the heroine of Madonnas of Leningrad.

Marina and Dima live in Seattle and on the weekend which opens the book, they are headed to one of the near-by islands for the wedding of their granddaughter. They didn't always live in Seattle. They met in Marina's new school when they were both eleven, after her parents had been arrested by the secret police in Russia. He protected her and taught her to be quietly defiant. They remained friends until the evening before he headed off to fight the Germans. He asked her to marry him when he returned and they became lovers that night, then he was gone.

Debra Dean's story weaves back and forth between the present and the Siege of Leningrad by the Germans. Her vignettes of the rooms in the Hermitage in Leningrad are startlingly vivid, especially when one realizes that the young Marina is reenacting her tours from memory as she faces the empty frames of the great art which has been sent to safe keeping in the event that the Germans reach Leningrad.

Is the Marina who sits on the ferry on her way to the wedding remembering what we read? Is she remembering the vivid details even as she gazes absently at the water? Even as she wonders who the woman next to her is until the woman calls her Mama. Of course, she remembers, Helen, Elana.

Marina is conscious that "[o]ne of the effects of this deterioration that as the scope of her attention narrows, it also focuses like a magnifying glass on smaller pleasures that have escaped her notice for years. She tried once to point out to Dimitri the bottomless beauty in her glass of tea. It looked like amber with buried embers of light and when held just so, there was a rainbow in the glass that took her breath away."

The day of the wedding, Marina sits on the patio of the hotel and finds herself seeing figures from the past. "Marina reaches for [her daughter-in-law] Naureen's hand and grips it tightly in her own. More distressing than the loss of words is the way that time contracts and fractures and drops her in unexpected places."

In the Hermitage, many of the paintings had religious themes and many of them included the Madonna. When Marina accompanied one of the older women, Anya, through the dark and empty halls, Anya would often stop and pray in front of frames which had held different Madonnas. And although Marina felt religion was for the masses, she too began furtively offering prayers. Life did seem to become more bearable. She survived and many others did not.

Dimitri, whose love for Marina never fades, finds that "she is leaving him, not all at once, which would be painful enough, but in a wrenching succession of separations. One moment she is here, and then she is gone again, and each journey takes her a little farther from his reach. He cannot follow her, and he wonders where she goes when she leaves." Perhaps she returns to the Hermitage and the multitudes of Madonnas offering comfort and compassion.

Reviewed by Judith Helburn
For Story Circle Book Reviews
www.storycirclebookreviews.org
reviewing books by, for, and about women

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A MUST REA

Someone said, "If you know someone who has Alzheimer's, you do not want to read this book." Absolutely not true! My father-in-law has Alzheimers and I found this book to be incredibly insightful and thoughtful in regards to Alzheimer's. Once I started this book I could not put it down. The way Debra Dean weaves the tales in this book just captured me. It is probably one of the best books I have read. Absolutely incredible. I immediately emailed all of my friends and told them they HAD to read this book! Just lovely!

Wonderfully written.

From the title of the book to every sentence in it I was captivated by the Madonnas of Leningrad.

My father has Alzheimers so I had that personal tie to what was going on also.

Simply a great book that grabbed me and held me through its entirety.

Thanks for writing it and thanks for publishing it!

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Hope endures in Madonnas of Leningrad

The grand, gilded frames hang empty on the walls of the Hermitage, a witness of hope for restoration of the paintings packed away for protection during the siege of Leningrad. Perhaps they are also a metaphor for the Marina's life - once filled with beauty and meaning, now under siege by a relentless enemy, Alzheimer's.

The Madonnas of Leningrad shines like a jewel from its many facets - art history and appreciation, human drama and war, the mystery of the inner person and the heartbreak of Alzheimer's. I was captivated from the first page to the last sentence of this book about beauty, this beautiful book.

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swept away

I was pretty much swept away by this story. I enjoyed the non-linear plotting and all the layering involved. I thought constantly of the film Russian Ark and also a friend who was born in a displaced persons camp where his Russian artist parents ended up after the war. It rang true that the parents, having experienced such horrors, avoided the details with their children.

However, the modern parts of the story seemed perfunctory, particularly in contrast with the richness of the historical portions. That's too bad - it cheats the reader. Marina's daughter lacks passion and intellectual curiosity, which seems false given some of her life choices. I wonder what sort of book it could have been if there were more balance in the presentation of the two eras. My three-star assessment is recognition of a great story idea told half-well: not great literature, not total chick-lit trash, ultimately worth reading.

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