The Illusion of Separateness: A Novel
4.5/5
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About this ebook
“The uncanny beauty of Van Booy’s prose, and his ability to knife straight to the depths of a character’s heart, fill a reader with wonder.” — San Francisco Chronicle
Award-winning author Simon Van Booy tells a harrowing and enchanting story of how one man’s act of mercy during World War II changed the lives of strangers, and how they each discover the astonishing truth of their connection.
The characters in Van Booy's The Illusion of Separateness discover at their darkest moments of fear and isolation that they are not alone, that they were never alone, that every human being is a link in a chain we cannot see. This gripping novel—inspired by true events—tells the interwoven stories of a deformed German infantryman; a lonely British film director; a young, blind museum curator; two Jewish American newlyweds separated by war; and a caretaker at a retirement home for actors in Santa Monica. They move through the same world but fail to perceive their connections until, through seemingly random acts of selflessness, a veil is lifted to reveal the vital parts they have played in one another's lives, and the illusion of their separateness.
Simon Van Booy
Simon Van Booy is the author of two novels and two collections of short stories, including The Secret Lives of People in Love and Love Begins in Winter, which won the Frank O'Connor International Short Story Award. He is the editor of three philosophy books and has written for The New York Times, The Guardian, NPR, and the BBC. His work has been translated into fourteen languages. He lives in Brooklyn with his wife and daughter.
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Reviews for The Illusion of Separateness
8 ratings3 reviews
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Take a few weird characters. Add a long time period (1939-2010). Mix a few locations in Europe and USA. Now stir well and throw connections between the different threads and don't forget to mix the people and the times. That sounds like a recipe that is easy to fail - coincidences and interconnectedness can work to a point. And building a novel by relying on this can be a disaster. Thankfully Van Booy has the writing skill to pull it off - and he manages to do it in a great way. It is easy to believe that someone's life does not influence the lives of others. It is even easier to imagine that we will never see and meet the people that were there at obscure parts of ours lives. But life makes its own choices - and people meet again, old pictures resurface and old secrets get uncovered. The characters in this novel are as diverse as possible - soldiers from both sides of WWII, children that grow up in different eras and change the lives of others, a blind girl that without even realizing it uncovers a part of her own family history. And somewhere there, almost hidden is the thread that connects them - it is spelled quite clearly in most cases but in some cases it is up to the reader to read carefully and not to miss it.When the different threads start tying together in the second part of the novel, you almost know what will happen. And yet - you keep reading. Because it is the style and the small things that make the novel - the secrets that noone else knows but are reveled because they add to the texture of the novel, the moments and occurrences that change the story and turns everything that you know on its head. And this kind of novel cannot even be judged for all the coincidences - because they are what the narrative is built on. If there is something that does not work, it is that some of the characters never grow up to a real 3-dimensional ones. They are there but they seem more like a clutch for some of the other characters (on the other hand some of the minor ones are fully built and believable). Or maybe I just wanted to see more from some of the characters - their stories and feelings were expressed in so little words. And yet - they stay and haunt you. The small graveyard in France (for only 4 people) chills you to the bones and the telegram that John sends at the end of the war makes you feel what they all felt. I want to read more from this author and if Indiespensable had not added an Early review copy of the book, I would probably never had picked it up. The story sounds way too much as something that can fail so easily... and so away from what I usually read.
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Simply exquisite. I wanted to turn back to page one and begin all over again.
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Absolutely fascinating novel. Marvelous interweaving of stories from different times and places. The circle of connection is phenomenal.