Friday, May 30, 2014

Five notable books about lost (and found) artifacts

Ayelet Waldman is the author of Love and Treasure, Red Hook Road and the New York Times bestseller Bad Mother: A Chronicle of Maternal Crimes, Minor Calamities and Occasional Moments of Grace. Her novel Love and Other Impossible Pursuits was adapted into a film called The Other Woman starring Natalie Portman. Her personal essays and profiles of such public figures as Hillary Clinton have been published in a wide variety of newspapers and magazines, including the New York Times, Vogue, The Washington Post, and The Wall Street Journal. Her radio commentaries have appeared on “All Things Considered” and “The California Report.”

One of Waldman's favorite books about lost (and found) artifacts, as shared at Goodreads:
The Messiah of Stockholm by Cynthia Ozick

Lars Andemening, the tormented, deluded, and often (inadvertently) hilarious hero of this gem of a novel, has managed to convince himself that he is the son of Bruno Schulz, the Polish artist and writer murdered by the SS in the town of Drohobych in 1942. A young woman throws Lars's delusions into disarray by appearing with a copy of what she claims is Schulz's legendary lost manuscript, The Messiah. And like Lars, she claims Schulz as her father. To describe the novel as a philosophical musing on literary influence and on the losses and displacements of the Holocaust is accurate but insufficient. Its pleasure lies in its wit and in Ozick's manipulation of realism and surrealism in a way reminiscent of Schulz himself.
Read about the other books on the list.

Visit Ayelet Waldman's website.

Writers Read: Ayelet Waldman.

The Page 69 Test: Love and Treasure.

--Marshal Zeringue