James McBride, "The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store"

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James Mcbride, "The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store" (2023)

 

뉴욕 타임즈 서평

 

잘 쓴 소설이다. 결국, 거의 다 읽은 다른 책을  제쳐놓고, 삼일 만에 이 책부터 다 읽었다. 어제와 오늘 오후에 코트에 나갔다가도 바람 때문에 테니스를 못 치고 들어온 것도 한몫했다. 작가는 George Eliot의 "Silas Marner"에서도 한 아이디어를 얻은 건 아닌지 모르겠다.

 

(혹시나의 관심을 위해) 아래는 위 서평에서 발췌:

 

The story opens in 1972, with the discovery of a skeleton buried in a well in Pottstown, Pa.... However, instead of a simple whodunit, the novel leaves the bones behind and swings back to the 1920s and ’30s, to Chicken Hill, the neighborhood in Pottstown where Jewish, Black and immigrant folks make their homes. It’s a community of people bonded together by the links of love and duty, and it’s here that McBride’s epic tale truly begins.

 

We first meet Moshe Ludlow, a Romanian Jew who owns the local theater and dance hall, and his wife, Chona, a headstrong, mighty-hearted American-born Jew who operates the grocery store for which the book is named. The grocery costs Moshe and Chona more money than it makes because Chona allows many of Chicken Hill’s Black and European immigrant residents to take out lines of credit that she never asks them to make good on. 

 

Nate Timblin — a Black man who works at Moshe’s theater and who is both respected and feared by the town’s Black population — asks Chona and Moshe to help hide an orphaned deaf Black child named Dodo, whom state officials are searching for and plan to institutionalize. While Moshe is resistant, Chona, who champions the most vulnerable in Chicken Hill, is adamant about helping.... Her drive to protect that light ultimately stirs the citizens of Chicken Hill to protect Dodo too.

 

“The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store” is a charming, smart, heart-blistering and heart-healing novel. Great love bursts through these pages via the friends and families that mobilize to protect Dodo, a child endangered by the structures he was born into and injured by. With this story, McBride brilliantly captures a rapidly changing country, as seen through the eyes of the recently arrived and the formerly enslaved people of Chicken Hill. He has reached back into our shared past when, by migration and violence, segregation and collision, America was still becoming America. And through this evocation, McBride offers us a thorough reminder: Against seemingly impossible odds, even in the midst of humanity’s most wicked designs, love, community and action can save us.