Winner of the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize 2012
The ghetto in which the Jews have been confined
is being liquidated by the Nazis, and eleven-
year-old Hugo is brought by his mother to
the local brothel, where one of the prostitutes
has agreed to hide him. Mariana is a bitterly
unhappy woman who hates what she has done
to her life, and night after night Hugo sits in
her closet and listens uncomprehendingly as
she rages at the Nazi soldiers who come and go.
When she’s not mired in self-loathing, Mariana
is fiercely protective of the bewildered, painfully
polite young boy. And Hugo becomes protective
of Mariana too, trying to make her laugh
when she is depressed, soothing her physical
and mental agony with cold compresses.
As the memories of his family and friends
grow dim, Hugo falls in love with Mariana.
And as her life spirals downwards, Mariana
reaches out for consolation to the adoring boy
who is on the cusp of manhood. Multi-awardwinning
writer Aharon Appelfeld once again
crafts out of the depths of unfathomable tragedy
a renewal of life and a deeper understanding
of what it means to be human.
________
"His fiction – with
Blooms of Darkness in its front rank – continues to mine depths and bring us blazing light from them. As a laboratory, and testing-ground, of human nature in its occasional glory and frequent shame, the wild child's adventures remain inexhaustible." -
Independent Radar Magazine
"What's so extraordinary about it is the way it continues to unfold and grow in the imagination long after you put it down. It's so sparely told, but Appelfeld somehow manages to fold entire stories into the silences between each chapter – each paragraph, even. It deserves to become a classic." -
Independent Foreign Fiction Prize judge and writer Hephzibah Anderson
“Aharon Appelfeld is fiction’s foremost
chronicler of the Holocaust. The stories he
tells, as here in
Blooms of Darkness, are small,
intimate, and quietly narrated and yet are
transfused into searing works of art by Appelfeld’s
profound understanding of loss,
pain, cruelty and grief.” –
Philip Roth
"With short, simple sentences and a brisk pace, the effect of this novel is reminiscent of a film, except that a film would place greater emphasis on dramatic incident and the horror of the situation. As readers, we are left to reflect on such matters for ourselves." –
East-West Review
"The parents' dilemma of how to live with horror and what to tell the children; Hugo's inexorable forgetting; the inability to understand what you fear […] all are caught in Appelfeld's glancing, delicate prose." -
The Independent
________
Read an excerpt from
Blooms of Darkness
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