My rating: 4 of 5 stars
“We think there are limits to the dimensions of fear. Until we encounter the unknown. Then we can all feel boundless amounts of terror.”
----Peter Høeg
Leah Kaminsky, an award winning Australian author, has penned a terrific and extremely soul touching story in her debut book, The Waiting Room that revolves around a Jewish woman who is also a doctor living with her husband and son in Israel whose ordeal through out a single day after the warning about a possible bomb threat is strikingly captured by the author, as the woman whose deceased mother's ghost keeps haunting her about the days that she underwent during the Holocaust, and as her mother's voice runs through her head, her fear grips her completely, making her question her life in such an unsafe place.
Synopsis:
Leah Kaminsky’s powerful fiction debut—a multi-generational novel perfect for fans of The Tiger’s Wife and A Constellation of Vital Phenomena—unfolds over a day in the life of a young physician in contemporary Israel, who must cope with modern threats in the shadow of her parents’ horrific wartime pasts.
A young doctor in Haifa, Israel, must come to terms with her family’s painful past—and its lingering aftermath—as the conflict between Palestine and Israel reaches its height and the threat of a terrorist attack looms over the city....
Born to two survivors in the smoky after-haze of WWII, Dina has never been able to escape her parents’ history. Tortured by memories of Bergen-Belsen, her mother leaves Dina to inherit her decades of trauma.
Dina desperately anchors herself in family—a cherished young son, a world-weary husband, and a daughter on the way—and her work as a doctor, but she is struggling to cope, burdened by both the very real anxieties of her daily life and also the shadows of her parents’ ghosts, who follow her wherever she goes. A witty, sensitive narrator, she fights to stay grounded in the here-and-now, even as the challenges of motherhood and medicine threaten to overwhelm her.
In taut, compelling prose, The Waiting Room weaves between Dina’s exterior and interior lives, straddling the present and the past—and building towards a profoundly dramatic climax that will remind readers of the fragility of human life even as it reassures them of the inescapable power of love and family.
On the morning of bomb threat in her homeland, Dina, a Jewish-pregnant general physician and mother of one young son, becomes skeptical of her life, of her day, of her security and of her son's security. Firstly she is reluctant to send her son to the school, next she is reluctant to see her patients, then she gets paranoid at the shoemaker's shop upon hearing the sirens, all the while dealing with her mother's ghost from the mother's past during the Holocaust period, when the mother and the father spent their days in the concentration camps. As terrorism and fear of Holocaust seeps into her mind, Dina questions her marriage and her shift from Australia to Israel to be with her husband's family. The bond of the marital relationship becomes to weaken with Dina's skepticism who wants to escape to Australia to provide security to her son and to her unborn child. But as secrets start to unravel before her soul, it shocks the hell out of Dina. Can Dina handle the bomb scare as well as the buried secrets from her past?
The author has strikingly captivated the state of mind of a pregnant Jewish woman, her cynicism and her skepticism for living outside the safe cocoon of her birth land, Australia. The ghost that keeps haunting her through the ages, with whom she constantly argues and at the same time, misses that ghost, is perfectly depicted by the author. The readers can actually feel the cold and harsh voice of the ghost of Dina's mother into their heads and with the story's depth, that voice will actually grip them. Moreover, Dina's fear will make the readers stand face-to-face with the brutal honesty of the society's fractures.
The author's writing style is excellent, laced with deep, heartfelt emotions that will make the readers feel its depth. The narrative is engaging enough to make the readers sty glued to the story line. The evocative prose along with a moderate pace makes it even more interesting for the story line to evolve through many layers and folds of this tale. The story is arresting right from the very first page itself as the epilogue reflects a deep meaning of after life.
The characters are well developed, but slightly marred by their dull daily chores which overshadowed the real voice of the main character. The main character is like I said before, paranoid and scared about her life, yet holds on to it, even though she is constantly reminded of her mother's past. So her struggle with the insecurity will make many readers contemplate with her, especially being a mother and fearing the safety of her children's lives. The rest of the supporting characters are also well drawn with enough sentiments.
In a nutshell, the story is heart touching, thoroughly poignant and extremely engrossing that will make the readers keep turning the pages of this book.
Verdict: A must read story of fear of war, terrorism, love and marriage.
Courtesy: Thanks to the author, Leah Kaminsky, for giving me the opportunity to read and review her book.
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Author Info:
Leah Kaminsky, a physician and award-winning writer, is Poetry & Fiction Editor at the Medical Journal of Australia. Her debut novel, The Waiting Room is published by Vintage (2015) and will be released by Harper Perennial US in 2016. We’re all Going to Die is forthcoming with Harper Collins in June 2016. She conceived and edited Writer MD, a collection of prominent physician-writers, which starred on Booklist (Knopf US 2012). She is co-author of Cracking the Code, with the Damiani family (Vintage 2015). She holds an MFA in Creative Writing from Vermont College of Fine Arts.
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