(Current fiction and quality fiction of the past.)
“No One Is Here Except All of Us” (Riverhead – Penguin) by Ramona Ausubel has 10 readers waiting for six copies due soon at the Albuquerque public library. This is one of those magical first novels that portend better things to come.
"Ausubel has written a riveting, otherworldly story about an all-too-real war and the transformative power of community." -- Library Journal
The publisher began circulating a two-minute video in August 2011 for the novel that came out in February 2012.
In the promotion piece Ausubel talks about her family history that inspired the novel. She has that clean, well-scrubbed look, and perfect teeth.
But the video doesn’t compel a reader to run out and buy the novel. It offers a slick, “forced” effort, something that Publishers Weekly picked up on in the book. One can see, however, a lot of grandmothers rushing out to buy – if only their granddaughters had looked so nice.
Examiner expects that Ausubel will produce significant contemporary literature once the publisher dumps its promotional style and let’s Ausubel’s writing mature on its own without pushing her. She writes with great promise.
The publisher notes that “Ramona Ausubel has been published in The New Yorker, One Story, The Paris Review Daily, The Best American Fantasty and elsewhere and has received special mentions in “The Best American Short Stories,” “The Best American Nonrequired Reading,” and was a finalist for the Puschcart Prize. She is a recipient of the Glenn Schaeffer Award in Fiction and a graduate of the MFA program at the University of California, Irvine.”
Her single story published in The New Yorker in April 2011 was titled “Atria” and part of it read like this: “Hazel did not tell her mother that she had had sex with a convenience-store clerk, and that it had been disappointing but harmless — she felt no ache to see the boy again, no real change in her own body, no broken heart. She had done this grownup thing, yet she suspected that her mother would find her even more childish for it.” – Copyright © The New Yorker
Simple, straight-forward stuff, but possibly a key to that Publishers Weekly observation about the novel: “Despite hints of beauty and meaning, the novel’s combination of magical realism and traumatic history feels forced, undermining its theme of the power of storytelling.”
“Forced” is not a nice thing to say about fiction, but Examiner feels that “beguiling, imaginative, inspiring story about the bigness of being alive as an individual” more than makes up for any shortfall in the mechanics of writing. Examiner recommends the novel and salutes such a promising young writer.
Here’s the publisher’s description of the novel. “A beguiling, imaginative, inspiring story about the bigness of being alive as an individual, as a member of a tribe, and as a participant in history, ‘No One Is Here Except All Of Us’ explores how we use storytelling to survive and shape our own truths. It marks the arrival of a major new literary talent.”
The story: In 1939, the families in a remote Jewish village in Romania feel the war close in on them. Their tribe has moved and escaped for thousands of years- across oceans, deserts, and mountains-but now, it seems, there is nowhere else to go.
Danger is imminent in every direction, yet the territory of imagination and belief is limitless. At the suggestion of an eleven-year-old girl and a mysterious stranger who has washed up on the riverbank, the villagers decide to reinvent the world: deny any relationship with the known and start over from scratch.
Destiny is unwritten. Time and history are forgotten. Jobs, husbands, a child, are reassigned. And for years, there is boundless hope. But the real world continues to unfold alongside the imagined one, eventually overtaking it, and soon our narrator-the girl, grown into a young mother-must flee her village, move from one world to the next, to find her husband and save her children, and propel them toward a real and hopeful future.
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