Fault Lines

By Nancy Huston

A brilliantly written family epic that won France’s Prix Femina and was shortlisted for the Orange Prize. “An immaculate novel” (The Guardian).
 
In a profound and poetic story, internationally acclaimed and bestselling author Nancy Huston traces four generations of a single family from present-day California to WWII-era Germany.
 
Fault Lines begins with Sol, a gifted, terrifying child whose mother believes he is destined for greatness partly because he has a birthmark like his dad, his grandmother, and his great-grandmother. When Sol’s family makes an unexpected trip to Germany, secrets begin to emerge about their history during World War II. It seems birthmarks are not all that’s been passed down through the bloodlines.
 
Closely observed, lyrically told, and epic in scope, Fault Lines is a touching, fearless, and unusual novel about four generations of children and their parents. The story moves from the West Coast of the United States to the East, from Haifa to Toronto to Munich, as secrets unwind back through time until a devastating truth about the family’s origins is reached. Huston tells a riveting, vigorous tale in which love, music, and faith rage against the shape of evil.
 
“Huston’s powerful novel combines the pacing of a thriller with the emotional intricacies that are the hallmark of the best family stories.” —Booklist, starred review

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
• Release date: Oct 14, 2008
• ISBN: 9780802198686

Book preview

I

Sol, 2004

I’m awake.

Like flicking on a switch and flooding a room with light.

Snapping out of sleep, clicking into wakefulness, a perfectly functioning mind and body, six years old and a genius, first thought every morning when I wake up.

My brain floods into the world, the world floods into my brain,

I control and own every part of it.

Palm Sunday     early     G.G. here visiting  Mom & Dad still asleep

A     sunny    Sunday     sun    sun   sun    sun    king      Sol      Solly     Solomon

I’m like sunlight, all-powerful, instantaneous and invisible, flowing effortlessly into the darkest corners of the universe

capable at six of seeing  illuminating  understanding everything

In a flash I’m washed and dressed, my hair is combed and my bed is made. Yesterday’s socks and underwear are in the dirty laundry basket, later in the week they’ll be washed, dried, ironed and folded by my mother, then returned to my top drawer ready to be used again. This is called a cycle. All cycles have to be controlled and supervised, such as the food cycle. Food circulates through your body and turns you into who you are, so you have to be careful about what you let in and what you keep out. I’m exceptional. I can’t allow just anything into my body: my poop has to come out the right colour and consistency, this is part of the circulation.

I’m actually never hungry and Mom is very understanding about this, she only gives me foods I like because they circulate with ease, yoghurt and cheese and pasta, peanut butter and bread and cereal, she doesn’t insist on the whole vegetable-meat-fish-eggs aspect of eating, saying I’ll get around to that when I’m good and ready for it. She makes me mayonnaise sandwiches and cuts the crusts off for me, but even then I eat only half or a quarter of the sandwich and it’s enough, I nibble at the bread and wet the small pieces with the saliva in my mouth and swish them up between my lips and gums to let them gradually dissolve because I don’t want to actually swallow them. The point is to keep my mind sharp.

Dad wishes I’d eat like a normal growing American boy. He worries about how I’ll manage at the cafeteria when I start school next fall but Mom says she’ll pick me up and bring me home for lunch, that’s what stay-at-home moms are for!

God gave me this body and mind and I have to take the best possible care of them so I can put them to the best possible use. I know He’s got high intentions for me, otherwise I wouldn’t have been born in the wealthiest state of the wealthiest country in the world, with the most powerful weapons system capable of blasting the whole human species to kingdom come. Fortunately God and President Bush are buddies. I think of heaven as one big Texas in the sky, with God rambling around in a cowboy hat and boots and checking to make sure everything’s in order on his ranch. Taking an occasional pot shot at a planet for the fun of it.

When they dragged Saddam Hussein out of his rat hole the other day his hair was all matted and dirty, his eyes bleary and bloodshot, his beard unkempt and his cheeks gaunt. Dad sat there in front of the TV set and cheered. ‘Boy, that’s what I call defeat,’ he said. ‘I hope all those Muslim terrorists know what’s in store for them.’ ‘Randall,’ said Mom, who was just then setting down a tray in front of him with an icy glass of beer and a bowl of peanuts, ‘we should be careful about what we say. You wouldn’t want to give Solly the impression that all Muslims are terrorists, would you? I’m sure there are Muslims living right here in California who are very nice people, I just don’t know them personally.’ She said this in a joking tone of voice but I know she was also telling the truth. Dad took a long swig of beer and said ‘Yeah, you’re right, Tessie, I’m sorry,’ and burped quite loudly which Mom decided to take as a joke so she laughed.

I’ve got wonderful parents who love each other which isn’t the case of most kids in my kindergarten. You can tell they love each other because their framed wedding photos are still standing on the buffet along with all the congratulations cards even though they got married seven years ago! Mom is actually two years older than Dad, I hate to admit it and she certainly doesn’t look it but she’s thirty years old, some of the kids in kindergarten have moms in their forties and my friend Brian’s mom is fifty which is older than my Grandma Sadie. That means she had him when she was forty-four years old which is disgusting, I can’t believe people go on screwing in old age. Yes I know how babies are made, I know everything.

It’s actually Grandma Sadie who chose my name for me. She always regretted not giving Dad a Jewish name, so when the next generation came along she didn’t want to miss her chance a second time and Mom said it was okay with her. Mom’s an easygoing person, she basically wants for everybody to be as happy as possible, and I guess Sol can be a Christian name too.

That’s about the extent of my grandmother’s influence in my life because luckily she lives far away in Israel and I almost never see her except in the photos she sends us which are always closeups so you can’t see she’s sitting in a wheelchair. I say luckily because if she lived any closer she’d try to interfere with us and boss us around like Dad says she always does. Even though he’s her own son he dislikes her, but at the same time he’s scared of her and doesn’t dare to stand up to her so whenever she comes here for a visit there’s quite a lot of tension in the air which upsets my mother. As soon as Grandma Sadie’s back is turned, Dad gets courageous and attacks her, once he said she was to blame for the death of his beloved father Aron who was a failed playwright at the age of forty-nine, and Mom said that as far as she knew Dad’s father was killed by smoking cigarettes rather than by his wife, but Dad said there was a well-known connection between cancer and repressed anger which I’m not sure what that means, repressed.

My father once lived in Israel himself when he was my age and he loved the city of Haifa so much that of all the places to live in the United States of America that’s why he chose California, because the eucalyptus and palm trees and orange groves and flowering bushes reminded him of those good old days. Israel is also where he started not liking Arabs because of some Arab girl he fell into and out of love with there, which I don’t know anything about because whenever he talks about it he gets all tense and clams up and even to Mom it’s a mystery what happened with this childhood sweetheart of his.

Grandma Sadie is a cripple and an orthodox Jew unlike anyone else in the family. She wears a wig because when you’re an orthodox Jewish female you’re not supposed to show your hair to anyone except your husband in case they covet you and want to screw you out of wedlock. Given that she’s widowed and confined to a wheelchair, I’d be surprised if anyone would like to covet and screw her but she still refuses to take off the wig. Recently this rabbi in Florida ordered Jewish women to stop wearing wigs made out of Indian women’s hair because in India they bow down to gods with six arms or elephant heads or whatever and their hair gets all sullied by praying to these gods so Jewish women will also get sullied by wearing wigs made out of it so they have to buy new synthetic wigs at once, the rabbi said, but Grandma said that was going too far.

The wheelchair is because of a car accident she was in many years ago but it certainly doesn’t keep her from getting around, she’s been to more countries than everyone in our family put together. She’s a famous lecturer and her own mother Erra (namely my great-grandmother who I call G.G.) is a famous singer and when Daddy gets around to enlisting for Iraq he’ll be a famous war hero and it’s up to me to decide what I want to be famous about but that’ll be no problem at all, fame runs in the family.

Unlike my father, whose mom was away hectoring in universities all the time when he was little, I have an excellent mom who decided to be stay-at-home out of her own free will and not because it was women’s destiny like in the olden days. Her name is Tess but I call her Mom. All children call their mothers Mom of course, and sometimes in the park another kid yells ‘Mom!’ and my mother spins around, thinking it’s me. I can’t believe she could confuse me with anyone else. ‘It’s like when someone else’s cell phone has the same ring as yours,’ she says. ‘You sort of snap to attention and then realise—oh, nope, it’s not me they want.’

It’s not like a cell phone. I’m unique. My voice is MY VOICE.

At kindergarten and elsewhere, I amaze everybody with my reading skills because Mom taught me to read when I was just a little baby. I’ve heard her tell the story a thousand times, how I’d be lying there in my crib and she’d flash these cards at me with words printed on them and pronounce the words, which she did for twenty-minute periods three times a day practically from the day I was born so I pretty much learned to talk and read at the same time and I can’t even remember when I didn’t know how to read. Mom says my vocabulary is awesome.

Dad’s away from dawn to dusk every weekday because he commutes more than two hours each way to work in Santa Clara at a job of programming computers in a very demanding capacity. He earns an excellent salary so we’re a two-car family—‘We’ve got more cars than kids!’ they sometimes say laughingly because Mom comes from a family where they had six kids and only one car. Her family was Catholic which meant my grandma wasn’t allowed to do family planning so she just kept on having babies until they got into deep financial waters and then she stopped. My father had a Jewish upbringing, so when he and Mom fell in love they decided to find a church halfway between Catholic and Jewish, and what they finally decided on was Protestant so they’re allowed to do family planning, basically what that means is the wife takes a pill and her husband can screw her as much as he likes without putting babies in her stomach, which is why I’m an only child. Mom wants to have another baby some day and Dad says they should be able to afford it a year or two down the line, but no matter how many kids they have I’m not worried about sibling rivalry, Jesus had a whole slew of brothers, too, and you never hear about what they did with their lives, there’s just no comparison.

Once a month my Dad goes to a men’s group where they talk about what it’s like to be a man nowadays since women started working. I’m not sure why he needs this group given the fact that my mother doesn’t work but anyhow they all take turns sitting in the hot seat and telling the truth about their problems and then they’re supposed to follow the group’s advice and if they disobey they’re punished with lots of push-ups and sometimes the whole group goes out and does manly things together like hiking and swearing and sleeping out in the wild and enduring mosquito bites because men have more stamina than women.

I’m sure glad I was born a boy because it’s far more unusual for boys to be raped than girls, except if they’re Catholic which we’re not. On the sobbing web which I stumbled on one day when I asked Google for images of the war in Iraq you can see hundreds of girls and women being brutally raped for free and it says they were really and truly harmed in front of the cameras. They sure don’t look as if they’re enjoying themselves especially when they’re gagged and tied up. Sometimes the men are not only screwing them in their mouth or their vagina or their anus but also making as if to cut their nipples off with craft knives, although you don’t see the nipples actually getting cut off so it might just be make-believe. Mohamed Atta and the other 9/11 terrorists also used craft knives when they flew the planes into the Twin Towers when I was three years old, I can still remember Dad calling me in to watch the towers falling down over and over again and saying ‘fucking Arabs’ and drinking beer.

I’ve got my own little computer on my desk in my room, surrounded by all my stuffed toys and picture books, my drawings from kindergarten neatly taped to the walls with Magic ©Scotch tape that won’t tear the wallpaper when you take it off, and also my name in wooden letters on wheels—S—O—L—which my mom painstakingly covered with gold leaf so it would shine and shine. My computer allows me to play games all by myself because I don’t have any brothers and sisters which is the main reason my parents bought it for me, so I wouldn’t feel lonely. I can play Scrabble and checkers, snakes-and-ladders, and a bunch of idiotic little computer games for kids, where you get to shoot people who are climbing up the walls of buildings and watch them tumble to the ground and then you get a point, or whatever. But given that my room is right next to my parents’ room, and given that I’ve got perfect control of my body and can walk on tiptoe without making a sound, it’s a cinch for me to slip into Mom’s computer while she’s doing the housework downstairs and get on Google and learn about what’s happening in the real world.

My mind is huge. As long as I keep my body clean and the food circulating correctly, I can process any amount of information, I can be President Bush and God combined, guzzling google. Dad told me the word googol used to mean the biggest number you could imagine—one followed by a hundred zeros—but now it’s pretty much the same thing as infinity. You just have to download and you can get the girls being raped or screwed in the anus by horses or dogs or whatever else you want, click click click, with animal cum dripping out of their mouths which are half-smiling. Mom almost never uses her computer and also she sings as she does the vacuuming so how could she possibly hear me clicking with my right hand on the mouse as I put my left hand on my crotch and start to rub. My mind is racing my stomach is almost empty I’m an exciting machine. I’m not allowed to but it’s easy to be two people a thousand people plus all the animals, everything will be fine as long as it’s carefully controlled and timed and structured.

did Dad…?

good thing I’m a boy

The corpses of Iraqi soldiers lying in the sand is one of my favourite things to click on. It’s a whole slide show. Sometimes you can’t even tell what body parts you’re looking at. Torsos maybe? Or legs? They’re sort of wrapped in rips and strips of clothing and they’re lying in the sand, partially covered by the sand which has absorbed their blood, it’s all very dry. You can see American soldiers standing around them, looking down at them and thinking There but for the grace of God … was this a human being?

When I was really little and my dad worked right nearby in Lodi, at a job that didn’t have as good a salary but didn’t take as long to commute to, he used to sing to me at bedtime, giving me a paddle-whacking like his father used to give to him. Now I’m usually asleep by the time he gets home so he doesn’t sing to me anymore but I know he still loves me as much as before and he’s just working so hard to keep us up with a good standard of living and be able to meet the mortgage payments for a two-garage house in one of the cushiest real estates in the country. Mom says this is something to be proud of, even if I miss those bedtimes with my dad.

Anyway one of my favourite songs he used to sing was called ‘Dry Bones’:

E-ze-kiel cried, ‘Dem dry bones’!

E-ze-kiel cried, ‘Dem dry bones’!

E-ze-kiel cried, ‘Dem dry bones’!

Oh hear the word of the Lord

The foot bone connected to the—leg bone,

The leg bone connected to the—knee bone,

The knee bone connected to the—thigh bone

He’d go paddle-whacking all the way up my body in semi-tones, then all the way down again. I used to love it, and I always think about that song when I see the dead Iraqi soldiers or the photographs of people sliced in two by a car accident, like wow, this is not reparable, not even by God when they get to heaven, you know what I mean? This torso is—all alone. This leg bone is connected to—nothing at all. It’s pretty scary because when you’re little and you watch old-fashioned cartoons on TV, you see characters like Tom and Jerry or Bugs Bunny or the Roadrunner getting crushed by heavy stones, whammed and blammed by cement mixers, sliced and diced by electric fans, or plummeting down cliffsides and splatting flat as pancakes on the highway, and then a couple of seconds later they’re all in one piece again and ready to go on to their next adventure. But with those Iraqi soldiers you can really tell there are no more adventures in store.

Mom is very much against violence, she gets emotional about it which is only natural because women are always more emotional than men. She’s just an extremely positive person and I don’t see any point in sullying her illusions. She supervises everything I watch on TV which means yes for ‘Pokemon’ and no for ‘Inuyasha‘, yes for ‘Gummi Bears’ and no for ‘The Simpsons.’ As far as movies go she says I’m still a bit too young for Harry Potter and The Lord of the Rings, which is unbelievable. I remember she didn’t even want me to see Bambi when my friend Diane from kindergarten gave me the DVD for my fifth birthday, even if it’s just an old cartoon she was afraid I’d be upset about the scene where Bambi’s mother gets killed. She thinks I’m too young to know about death so I do my best to protect her. Last week we saw a dead sparrow at the edge of the road and she started stroking my hair and saying ‘It’s all right, darling, he’s in heaven with God now’ and I clung to her leg and sobbed to make her feel better.

To her, Arnold Schwarzenegger is nothing but the governor of California. She’s never seen any of his films but I have thanks to my friend Brian or rather his parents. They’ve got lots of old videos in their rec room down in the basement, all three Terminators plus Eraser plus Collateral Damage, to say nothing of the complete collection of Star Wars and also Godzilla which is like a remake or rather a pre-make of 9/11 with the Manhattan skyscrapers tumbling down and New Yorkers screaming in panic and running around in all directions. We watch them to our heart’s content because Brian’s mom isn’t stay-at-home and his babysitter doesn’t mind as long as she can paint her toenails and talk to her boyfriend on her cell phone. Schwarzenegger as a robot is totally awesome, he’s unbeatable and indestructible, if his human skin surface gets damaged he’s got no qualms about cutting open his own arm or cutting out his own eyes with a scalpel, so I’m definitely not going to be jittery about my mole operation next July.

Dad is not an athlete or a sportsman by any stretch of the imagination but in the summertime he plays softball with guys his age in the neighbourhood. He takes it quite seriously because it was one of the things he used to share with his dad when they lived in New York City. He bought me a game called Base, which means there’s a T-ball stand you set the plastic ball on and you practise hitting it with a plastic bat, someone runs to pick up the ball for you and then you start all over again. During Dad’s softball games, Mom and I play Base together. Some of Mom’s friends are surprised to see her running to pick up the ball about a hundred and seventy-five times in a row, clapping and cheering for me and saying ‘Hooray, Sol! Good for you!’ every single time. They think it must be boring for her but I know it’s not; it goes along with her love for me. Instead of boasting to them about my great destiny, she just shrugs and tells them it burns off calories.

I’ll be starting real school in the fall and I intend to listen to everything, record everything and get sterling grades while still keeping a low profile; for the time being I don’t want anyone else to know that I’m the Sun King, Only Sun and Only Son, Son of Google, Son of God, Eternal Omnipotent Son of the World Wide – Web. WWW turned upside down is MMM: apart from My Miraculous Mother to whom I’ve allowed brief glimpses, no one has the vaguest notion of the brilliance, the radiance, the fabulous radioactivity in my brain that will one day transform and heal the universe.

I’ve only got one defect which is this mole on my left temple. It’s the size of a quarter, round and raised, brown and fuzzy. A tiny defect—but on the temple of Solomon, even tiny defects have to be eliminated. Mom’s making arrangements for it to be surgically removed in July. Dad’s a bit against it, but he’ll probably be in Iraq by then.

The war in Iraq has been over for almost a year now but lots of American soldiers are still getting killed over there and when Dad gets upset about this Mom tries to gently change the subject and get him thinking about something pleasant instead. ‘There’s no point in getting all het up about things you can’t change, Randall,’ she says. ‘All we can do is try to keep this world as safe a place as possible, each at our own level. President Bush is doing his job, you’re doing yours and I’m doing mine.’

Mom’s job is to keep me safe and I think we’ve probably got the safest house on the planet. It’s childproofed, which is a word Mom explained to me a couple of weeks ago. (She always insists on explaining things to me as fully, honestly and clearly as possible, and the minute she tells me something I know it forever as if I’d invented it myself.)

‘Our house is childproofed,’ she said, ‘which means we’ve done everything in our power to make it safe for children.’

‘And our fence is burglarproof,’ said Dad, ‘which means we’ve done everything in our power to make it safe for burglars.’

‘No, no,’ said Mom. ‘There’s a difference between proof and proofed. An umbrella is rainproof, which means that rain can’t get through it.’

‘And my whisky is 70-proof’, said Dad, ‘which means it’s forbidden to people over 70.’

Mom laughed because Dad kept on trying to make jokes, but the way she laughed made it clear that he should stop interrupting; then she went on telling me about how they childproofed the house. For instance, all the electrical outlets are covered over in case I try to stick my fingers into them and get electrocuted with my hair all sticking out in all directions and my eyes popping out of their sockets like a cat in a cartoon or like one of the guys that gets sent to the chair by President Bush for being on Death Row. There are soft plastic rounded corners added to every right-angle table and counter in the house so I won’t bang into them and get a deep gash in my head with lots of blood spurting out of it, then have to be rushed to the hospital and get stitches as my parents stand next to my bed, tearing their hair out with anguish and guilt. Also the burners to the stove have a special blocking mechanism so I can’t turn them on by accident and burn myself by sticking my hand into the flame or setting fire to the curtains, which would set fire to the whole house and leave me nothing but a little pile of charred flesh like an Iraqi soldier amidst the smoking ruins of our house, whereas Dad just took out a second mortgage on it. Even the toilet is childproofed so the lid won’t fall on my penis while I’m peeing, which I guess would really hurt. When I want to poop I have to call Mom to come and unhook a hook and let the lid down very carefully.

Mom knows about all this stuff thanks to a course she took on parent-child relationships. It wasn’t only about child-proofing, it was about all the other aspects, like how you should respect your children and listen to them and not treat them as if they were stupid idiots the way parents used to treat their children in the olden days. I must admit that Mom has never made me feel like an idiot. It’s like with Mary and Jesus. Mary would never go against any of Jesus’s wishes because she knew he had a special destiny cut out for him, so she just kept all these things in her heart and pondered them. The main difference is, I don’t plan to end up nailed to any old Cross.

Mom always comes to say prayers with me at bedtime. We invent a different prayer every night, we can ask God to help us bring peace to Iraq and make all the Iraqis believe in Jesus, or we can have a special thought for the health and happiness of our family members, or we can thank God for giving us such a nice neighbourhood to live in. Praying’s like a private conversation between you and God except you can’t really hear the answers, you’ve just got to trust in them.

‘You’re the most precious thing in the world to me,’ Mom said once as she was kissing me goodnight after prayertime.

‘More precious than Dad?’ I asked her.

‘Oh, there’s no comparison,’ she said, laughing, and I’m not sure what her laughter meant but I got the feeling it meant Yes. I think she basically sees Dad as the breadwinner in the family and a helper around the house, and they talk over important things together like whether they’ll be able to afford a new kitchen next year, but she’s also acutely aware of his defects. For instance, Dad’s the sort of person who sometimes loses his temper in an unpredictable way. Once the three of us went up to Sequoia National Park, it was a nice October day, we were all in a good mood and sort of ambling down the road hand in hand. The nature was so beautiful that it made Dad nostalgic for when he used to live

Reviews for Fault Lines

[jayne_charles_1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

This was an interesting and thought provoking book. Written in such a way as to follow a family backwards through time, each chapter being narrated by a member of the generation older than the previous one, it weaves its way through America, Israel and back to Germany during the war.This method of narration was interesting, but had the limitation that just as you got to know a character they disappeared from the book altogether, as the story moved back in time to before they were born. It wasn't so much that I liked and missed the characters (it wasn't really that sort of book), but the precocious child of the first section was so gloriously obnoxious and so desperately in need of a good kicking that it was disappointing not to know whether he ended up getting one.

[mhleigh · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

This work chronicles the (largely shared) history of one family, from World War II until the present. Interestingly, the story begins in the year 2004 and then works backwards through generations - Sol, then his father Randall in 1982, Randall's mother Sadie in 1962, and Sadie's mother Kristina from 1944-1945. Each time the family is revisited, the new main character is around the same age, about 6. This family has many shared ties (although they don't often seemed to be discussed). The obvious - a large birthmark that appears on various parts of the body, and the less obvious, uncertainty and confusion.In the first story Sol tells of his parents, who have praised him so often and extremely that he now considers himself to be a new messiah. While his mother is concerned with pampering him and making sure he only watches G rated movies, he waits for an unobserved moment to sneak onto her computer and google unbelievably horrific images. The result is an extremely disturbed child totally lacking in empathy, told consistently he is perfect in every way. A generation before, Randall tells how his parents decide to move to Israel so his mother can work on her passion project, researching a dark family secret. During this time the religious tensions are rising and eventually come to a tragic conclusion. His mother Sadie then takes over the story, relating how she is raised by her grandparents to be perfect, which she can never quite attain. Sadie waits impatiently for the sporadic, fantastic visits by her mother, a rising star in the world of singing, whose carefree life is such a contrast to her own. Lastly, the family matriarch, Kristina, recounts her life in World War II Germany, in a family waiting for the the war to end with increasing desperation. Meanwhile, the family is hiding a secret which will come back to impact future generations.Quote: "Listen, darling, it's important to me to find out as much as I can about this. It's for your sake, too, you know? I mean, how can we build a future together if we don't know the truth about our past, right?"I have really mixed feelings about this book. At the beginning I did not care for it at all - Sol's story is somehow both uninteresting and disturbing. It seemed to constantly look to shock and disgust, but for no other reason than to be shocking and disgusting - it does not advance the story or the character. Additionally, it was difficult to believe it was the thought process of a six year old, even an extremely advanced, warped six year old. However, I am glad I persevered through the first narrative, because I found it increasingly more enjoyable as the book progressed. The end of Sol's chapter features a family reunion which is very interesting, and each successive chapter improves after that. The reverse format of the book was unique, and puts the reader in the position of going back to the beginning to discover the fate of characters or the outcomes of events mentioned in the current section. However, some big holes are still left in the story which aren't resolved in any of the discourses.

[bachaney · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

Nancy Huston's "Fault Lines", an acclaimed best seller in France, is a peculiar read. The novel tells the story of four generations of one family, and the narrator of each story is a six year old child from a different generation of the family. Although the character at the center of the story, Erra, is in each of the stories, that is where the connection between the characters and narratives stops. The stories are disjointed from each other, and the narrative voice in each is muddled and unbelievable. As I read this novel I couldn't help wondering if I was missing something that was lost in the translation of the novel from the original French to English. The last two stories, about Sadie and her mother Erra, were the best, and by the end of Erra's story I was emotionally involved--and the novel finally revealed the twist promised on the book jacket. The first story about Sol, the young boy in modern California, was downright disturbing. I certainly hope six year olds don't think like that, and that the French realize all Americans aren't like Sol!I was disappointed by this book--it was not what I expected it to be. I thought the book would be more about the effect Erra's secret had on the generations of her family, but it didn't really explore those issues in a deep way, rather it brushed the surface of what could have been a much deeper and more interesting exploration. I would encourage others to read this book, because like all literature, they might get something more out of it than I did. But overall, "Fault Lines" just was not for me.

[maryreinert · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

I read this years ago and remembered it as being outstanding. Tried it again just to see if my memory or my tastes had changed. Not at all! This is a beautifully written story that transends time or place. At first glance one wonders how the story of Norwegian peasants in the 19th century can be relevant today? But as we live so far removed from nature, are so surrounded by words and noise (mostly meaningless) and spend so much time worrying about our psyches, "Growth of the Soil" provides the exact antithesis of our world. It provides a perspective of what is really necessary for life and contentment and what needs to be let go of and what needs to be retained. It is a simple story of simple people, but it is far from shallow. The writing is beautiful and conveys so well the nuances of relationships and the impact of nature on humanity.

[sharlene_w · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Initially I was a little put off by the child speaking in the present tense with a voice and language of an adult, but I soon came to the conclusion that it was all part of the story. It took me a while though to learn that it was the tale of 4 generations in the same family told from the perspective of each member in the generational chain as a young child. It was interesting following the child's history back to learn how each child was the product of its parents and the time and place they grew up in.

[keepingup · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

I thought the format was interesting and fresh - told, in the first person, by four generations of a family at similar ages. I think the story had a lot more to share, especially the last two characters - however, the short story format didn't allow the reader to become too familiar with the character or the history of the family. I chose this book because of the nomination as a short list for the Orange Prize and wanted to read the short list of three novels. I had truly enjoyed the winner of this particular year ('The Road Home' by Rose Tremain) - this one unfortunately didn't compare.

[lynnb_64 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

I enjoyed this story a great deal. It is a four-generation family saga, told backwards. The narrator of each section is six years old: Sol in 2004, his father Randall in 1982, Randall's mother Sadie in 1962 and Sadie's mother Kristina in 1944-45. As the perspective shifts from one narrator to another, Nancy Huston provides us with ever-deeper understanding of the family and the events that shaped them. Very well done.

[mirrani_1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

This story takes you backwards through a family's history. You start out in "modern" times, with a boy and his parents, then back up all the way to the war and stories of German soldiers, but it is all related through the one family. The boy annoyed me so much that I wanted to put the book down and walk away, but I am so very glad that I stuck with it. It was an interesting adventure into the history of a character, seeing someone first as an adult, then watching the events unfold that made them into the adult they are "today."As I said before, there were parts I found incredibly frustrating, but once I moved past them I found the rest to be intriguing, touching, and highly entertaining. It was as if once I got past the breakers I could swim on in the pages forever. There are a lot of reviews that talk about the subject of the book, but don't quite review the story as a whole, but that is a hard thing to do, since it is so unique. It is really a series of short stories, told in the first person, each taking you farther back in time as you move to the end. There are times I felt some parts of the story wanted to reveal much more, but stopped short, leaving me wanting more in more ways than one.This book was shortlisted for the Orange/Women's Prize and it is very easy to see why. There are secrets hidden in this family, but it is no secret that this is a book many will enjoy.

[ridgewaygirl · Rating: 2 out of 5 stars]

I picked up this book knowing nothing about it except that it was a bestseller in France, where it won the Prix Femina. The idea is intriguing; the book is divided into four parts, each subsequent section following a parent of the six-year-old child in the previous chapter, explaining their odd behaviors as parents as caused by events occurring when they were young. Each child is profoundly affected by the wars fought at the time of each story although none are in war zones. Huston writes with ease and beauty.All the other girls are smug and competent and quick. They calmly snip away at paper snowflakes while I sweat and fret because my scissors are too dull. In the locker room they change smoothly into and out of their gym clothes while I struggle and blush. Their clothes are cooperative and neat, mine are rebellious: buttons jump off, stains blossom and hems surreptitiously unstitch themselves.However, the first section is really bad. It proceeds with an angry cleverness but no heart. It's a parody that pokes fun at the characters without understanding them. The mother is a bundle of contradictions, simultaneously over-protective and oddly negligent, conflicted and stubborn, but we never discover why because the next segment concerns the passive husband. The structure means that this is really a collection of four novellas, each (except for the first) which could have been a compelling book, but remained too short, each chapter closed as I became involved in their story. Too much remained unrevealed, unspoken, unresolved. I didn't like or dislike this book. I suspect that it won't stay with me long, despite the agile writing and the many shocking revelations.

[lt999 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

What a wacky book. At first I was just curious what this book was about. At the end of chapter, it got pretty exciting. The author sometimes injects too much of her political agendas from children's point of view. I thought that was somewhat cowardly. Nevertheless, it was an entertaining book.

[twoods9 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Like previous reviewers, I was a little disappointed with this novel. The depiction of Sol, the most recent generation of the family, was very disturbing and unbelievable. If he was maybe nine years old I would have been able to suspend my disbelief but six? I'm not so sure. I thought that at least the nature of the "dark family secret" would shed some light on Sol's character, but if it did, I didn't see it.That being said, I did enjoy the successive narratives, and I thought that the remaining charachters were interesting and well portrayed.

[bhowell_35 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Another winner from Nancy Huston, a real page turner. Contempory novels rarely stick to chronological order and this one tells the story directly backwards but it is very effective. We go back to the cruelties of the Nazis in the 2nd World War and although it is, one might say, a well utilized genre, this book highlights the tragedy, not of Jews , but of children stolen from their families, due to their Aryan looks from many different backgrounds. they were chosen for placement with German families, particularly those who had lost children in the war. One thing that is heartbreaking about this book is that Kristina was placed as a baby with a kind and loving German family, particularly a loving mother. She is torn away at age 6 and eventually placed with a Ukrainan couple in Canada. (Her background was Ukrainian) Her new parents are cold and unloving and Kristina, later "Effie" has a difficult life as do her descendants. Shock waves continue down the generations to 2004, the 6 year old Sol.

[msbaba · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Fault Lines, by bilingual Canadian-born author Nancy Huston, is a brilliant, inventive, and thought-provoking literary tour-de-force, but what draws readers into this gem, and keeps their attention riveted, is Huston's masterful skill at creating and maintaining an overriding sense of quiet mystery and suspense at every turn of the page. No wonder the author's original French language version was a bestseller and won the 2006 Prix Femina. No wonder the author's English version, released last year in the U.K and Canada, was shortlisted for the 2008 Orange Prize. This is one great book!Lost identity and the destructive fault lines that run through families are the twin themes that run through this novel. Four successive generations of six-year-old children narrate the story; each is the son or daughter of the next narrator. Each separate narration forms its own approximately 75-page novella. The stories intertwine like the tangled roots of a family tree to form a mysterious whole. We follow these children backwards in time, from California, to Canada, to Israel, and ultimately to Nazi Germany. Far before we get to the last narrator, we know that she was a victim of the Nazi Lebensborn program—one of thousands of Aryan-looking children who were kidnapped from their parents and taken to Germany to be raised as Germans. As the story progresses backwards in time, we pick up many pieces of a puzzle. Finally, in the end, they all come together and form a stark picture of truth. In the beginning, we are introduced to Sol, an outlandishly disturbing young narrator. Sol is a six-year-old, one-of-a-kind 21st-century bad seed—a child with an IQ in the stratosphere, an obsession for hard-core pornography, and a personality that is edging as close to a sociopath as any normal kid can get and still have the outside chance of maturing into a psychologically stable adult. Sol is a kid who can run circles around his parents—an Arab-hating, beer-swigging, bigot of a father, and a clueless mother who caters to Sol's every whim. Sol sees himself as the all-powerful center of his own universe. But if Sol's a monster, he's as crazy as he is amusing…and, at least to this reader, wickedly endearing.The structure of the novel is compelling, moving us backwards in time from child to parent through four generations. At first this feels awkward—to move backwards—but getting at the truth in this manner ultimately proves wholly authentic. In real life we generally stumble upon difficult questions and solve them by working backwards until we finally get at the source and uncover the truth. We know we've arrived at the truth where all the crucial pieces of the puzzle fit together and make sense. As I write this review in mid-August 2008, Fault Lines is scheduled for its U.S. publication debut in a few weeks. Personally, I would be delighted to see this quiet intriguing literary mystery novel hit the American book market with the same rumbling earthquake that its publication produced in France…but the publisher and the author don't see it that way. They fear American readers will be turned off by the distinct anti-American shadow cast by Sol and his parents…and they have a point. Certainly some of the other reviews on this site have proven them right. The same odd character traits that caught the attention of the French and made them smile, will probably cause Americans to become uncomfortable and angry. This book will probably not be an American bestseller; however, I'm confident that literary readers will discover this book and it should sell well in that niche. Over a year ago, there was quite a hullabaloo when the press got word that the American publisher was encouraging the author to modify her U.S. version in order to improve its marketability. I'm pleased to report that the author chose the path of literary integrity and did not take this advice.

[brenzi_3 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

“God gave me this body and mind and I have to take the best possible care of them so I can put them to the best possible use. I know He’s got high intentions for me, otherwise I wouldn’t have been born in the wealthiest state of the wealthiest country in the world, with the most powerful weapons system capable of blasting the whole human species to kingdom come. Fortunately, God and President Bush are buddies.” (page 4)The year is 2004 and six year old Sol, who is wise beyond his years, is pontificating about the state of the human species, among other things. He is the first of four related characters who tell the story of their childhood in Nancy Huston’s brilliant 2008 Orange Prize short listed novel, Fault Lines. Huston uses a variety of literary devices to tell the story of four generations of this California family. She very effectively tells the story backwards chronologically, taking us from present day California to 1980’s Hiafa, to 1960’s Toronto, to 1944 Germany. Along the way the author slowly reveals the family’s secret, by planting clues in each narrative and weaving the story together in a way that exposes the mystery as you peel away the narrative layers. Each character telling the story is about six years of age and very intelligent. Almost too intelligent; like the smartest kids I’ve ever heard of with language skills beyond belief. But if you can suspend disbelief here, you’re in for a very enjoyable read.If I say much more I will give away the secret. So let me just say that if you like a mystery, if you enjoy peeling away layers of intrigue, if unexpected developments are right up your alley, if you like the charm of literary devices and smooth, poetic writing and excellent historical fiction, this may be the book for you.