The House of Widows: An Oral History

This beautifully written family saga holds ones attention from the first to the last pages. As an only son, James Pak, an American, is shocked by his father's suicide just as James is about to leave for Oxford for further studies in history. Feeling that his own prodding the elder Pak about the family in Europe might have contributed, James makes it his mission to learn about them and himself as well. As the story unfolds the after-effects of WWII and the havoc it played among those caught in it, shed light on the elder Pak's life story and his personal demons. Weaving this suspenseful story from Boston through several European capitals, Melnyczuk, a masterful storyteller, fills it with memorable characters interpreted with sensitivity and psychological insight. One ends the book with the conviction that wars and upheavals do cast dark shadows over future generations; perhaps a word to the wise in today's world of conflict and impantience. Definitely a must read book!

It begins with flirtation, then it altogether seduces you, finally grabing you and then ricocheting around in your mind like a pin ball in a machine. It's a 360% narrative exploration of historical happenstance, honor/dishonor, existential choices, responsibility and love. It's an extraordinary novel, extraordinary because in a multitude of passages, it attains near perfect compositional pitch ("soft, touch me sweaters"; "They seemed to have grown past sex. Maybe it had been civilized out of them, turned into culture or dogma or doubt"; or "It's impossible to say anything fresh about a kiss. Paint me the taste of oysters swallowed by moonlight; teach Homer to pigeons; build Paris with a spoon. If you're lucky in love, the kisses you've won blur like a view of the infinite, fading tiers of Himalayas. Yet, once, maybe twice, in a lifetime a kiss comes along that changes everything, and the clock of one's life is reset"); because it illuminates the relationships among the past, present and the future from cross-cultural perspectives infrequently enountered by the English-speaking reader; and also because it explores in a calm, humane but unflinching manner the always strange and often strained relationships between the powerful and the comparatively powerless in wars, politics and love.