BURNT SHADOWS by K. Shamsie, Merely a Smoldering Outline

I admired the message BURNT SHADOWS aims to emblazon but is awash in its overly ambitious objectives.  The story begins with the Japanese heroine, Hiroko, in Nagasaki the day the atomic bomb was unleashed.  Hiroko is a gifted linguistics, able to speak and deftly learn foreign languages.  Hiroko falls in love with Konrad, a German for whom she was working as a translator.  Konrad is killed in the bombing while Hiroko survives the devastation.  She moves to Tokyo where her language skills enable her financially & secures herself passage to India.  She sets out in 1947 to find Konrad's sister, Ilse.  Ilse, is also of German descent and married to a Brit.  Ilse & Hiroko form a lifetime friendship that spans the globe and years from 1945 to the 21st C.  Their lives are the underpinnings for the novel's intent:  to expose man's inhumanity in war.  Ilse tells her granddaughter, Kim, "I've lived through Hitler, Stalin, the Cold War, the British Empire, segregation, apartheid."  Hiroko shielded the horrors "too terrible to tell her son" only to wish she had "told everyone, written it down and put a copy in every school."  Shamsie brings in the war in Afghanistan, India & Pakistan conflicts and the attack on the World Trade Center.  Numerous pages state "This page intentionally left blank."  It's commendable  this anti-war novel also speaks of international camaraderie.  But, it fails miserably as a cohesive & engaging story worth your time.    

Stegner's "Angel of Repose" Brilliant from Every Angle

The Pulitzer Prize & Nat'l Book Award winning author Wallace Stegner is called the Dean of Western Writers.  ANGLE OF REPOSE tells the story of Susan Ward, an artist/writer in the late 19th C.  Born & raised in gentility in the east whose marriage to Oliver Ward, a mining engineer, takes her to the rough frontier of the unsettled west.  Her life's story is being chronicled by her grandson, Lyman Ward, a writer/historian mainly through the large body of letters Susan wrote to her beloved friend Augusta, and her husband Thomas.  Her candid, detail letters portray the hardships & isolation on the western frontier.  There is great adventure & majesty captured in Susan's letters & illustrations.  She also depicts life's adversities & the dissolution of faith & love in her marriage.   Lyman is emeshed in his grandmother's life at a time when his own marriage has unraveled after many years.  There are many prominent themes in this panoramic novel:  western expansion & adventure, social class, proprieties and unconventional behaviors, generational divides.  All these threads undergird the fulcrum of the novel.  Stegner's interest lies with how couples' relationships come to rest.  Lyman questions his grandparents' marriage, "How two such unlike particles clung together, and under what strains, rolling downhill into their future until they reached the angle of repose."  ANGLE OF REPOSE, from every slant, is storytelling at its most gratifying and fulfilling.