It's (Throwback) Thursday! Let’s talk about Ruta Sepetys and Between
Shades of Gray.
I read this in the summer of 2011. Ian and I were on holiday
in Cornwall,
staying in a beach hut style cottage and I started this book on the beach at St
Ives and finished in my beach hut bed whilst Ian read a car magazine beside me.
I seem to recall we drank wine and ate Maltesers and it would have been so
lovely had this book not crushed my soul. I got about three quarters of the way
through, said to Ian ‘I think I’m sad,’ and promptly burst into tears. Like, I
was actually sobbing. We're talking proper ugly crying here people, the real deal.
The book is about, in a nutshell, Siberian work camps in WWII and
it’s really freaking brutal.
It’s also exceptionally well written.
This is WWII like I’d never really seen before, and I hated
myself for that. I never really knew that any of this terrible horrible stuff even happened. You just don’t
hear about it the same as you do say, the Holocaust, or at least I never had.
You think about WWII and you think about Hitler and the mass genocide of the Jews,
but this, the millions of people that were killed by Stalin and his men, it’s
kind of glossed over. We’d touched on it briefly at school, and I knew Stalin
was a total dickwad, but the atrocities portrayed in Between
Shades of Gray, (which, fitting title is fitting, as a by the by because this book is all about varying shades of gray - good people doing shitty things and random acts of kindness from total bastards) those atrocities I
had little idea about.
& that ignorance left me feeling disturbed and guilty and somehow
humbled.
That’s the thing I think: that this might be a work of ‘fiction’ but
at the same time it’s totally not. It’s not. These
things happened. It’s part of our history, and
what the hell is there that feels like a sucker-punch in quite the same way as knowing that? That
letting people freeze to death in huts they built themselves whilst enjoying a
glass of whiskey by a fire is a thing that happened? That it's only one in a too long list of inhuman things that happened to innocent people.
Reading this book made me angry, it made my chest physically
hurt – breathing in, filling my lungs, at some points hurt
– it broke my heart. Not just the brutality of it either, but the hope; each
and every smile made my eyes water, each joke made me want to cry, each tiny
act of kindness felt like a knife wound and the love story, Lina and Andrius. Jesus
God. I swear. I don’t know if it made me hurt more or less.
Even thinking about it now kind of makes me want to cry a
little bit.
And yet. And yet.
I could not put it down. I swear. I couldn’t stop reading.
Here’s the thing. This book is not a nice book. Bittersweet,
that’s the word: it will not fill you with any kind of joy, really (although,
that said there are moments that shine like a beacon in the darkness, like the
brightest of stars in the night sky)
It will, instead, smash your heart into millions of tiny little pieces.
‘Why the hell,’ I hear you (especially you, Helen. You are
particularly loud. I am a mystery to you, I know.) ‘would I want to read a book that's going make me so sad?’
You want to read it because whilst it’s not pretty, it is beautiful. And it will change you. And it matters. You need to read it, you do, because I’m not
exaggerating when I tell you that it is phenomenal, but, (and this is very important) you need to read it
prepared for what it will make you feel.
