Akin (Emma Donoghue)

 

I had a copy of Room, but I never did read it. This was my first experience with Emma Donoghue. 

One aspect I thought was interesting was family secrets. Noah knows negative things about Michael's father, but he keeps it to himself. I wondered if that was really fair to Michael. Is it better to be honest?  

(i.e. the maroon chip) p. 213: One the back, Ninety Days. but anyone could get hold of a plastic token: buy them by the dozen online, pick one up off the sidewalk. It proved nothing, except to a gullible child.....it could just possibly have been true: if ever his nephew had made a real effort to sober up, surely it would have been when he'd just sent the woman he loved to prison for five years, leaving his son motherless. An even bigger pity, if Victor had made it to the three-month mark before his final lapse.

The irony is that after those thoughts, Noah goes on to say that chemists have an unusually high death rate: a long tradition of blinding and scarring and poisoning ourselves. 

How is that any different than Michael's father, really?

Another interesting thing about this book was how every part of a family influences someone. Sometimes we think we're a black sleep or not like the rest of our family, but is that really the case. In the story, Michael is really not that different from Noah. Noah keeps hearing his wife's voice, as if a conversation is going on with her throughout the story. 

Another interesting connection to that is Noah's search for answers about his mother. Was she involved with all the missing children? Was she a helper or a snitcher? Also, the children represent connections to our past. 

p. 229 Imagine if you forgot your real name and date of birth, and when the war was over you couldn't remember who you really were, or find....any of your family who were left?"
"I'd remember." Michael's voice was stern.
"Well, some of them were just toddlers, So Abadi and Rosenstock, what they did was, they wrote down all the kids' true facts, made three identical cards for each, with photographs, fingerprints, addresses, relations, the whole works."
The paradox was that these cards had endangered the entire Marcel Network, hiders and hidden alike. But then, it wasn't fair to save a child's life at the cost of stripping him of who he was.


The connection between generations was another theme. On p. 220 Noah is showing Michael photos from a book. He shows him the first faked photos, dated in 1840 as well as selfies where a guy posed himself as a drowned man and Michael quickly responds that he does that too and flips through his camera roll to show himself as a corpse on grass. Another examples was on p. 222 when Noah is trying to explain the law of closure in photography (the viewer fills in what they don't see, what's missing) and relates it to the FedEx logo. Michael replies, "The arrow. I never didn't see the arrow"....knowing right away what he is talking about. 

p. 237 Michael's tattoo: F.O.E. (Family Over Everything)

Then there's the irony of Noah saving Michael just as perhaps his mother saved Jewish children during the war? Or did she? 

Goodreads says:

In her first contemporary novel since Room, bestselling author Emma Donoghue returns with her next masterpiece, a brilliant tale of love, loss and family. A retired New York professor’s life is thrown into chaos when he takes his great-nephew to the French Riviera, in hopes of uncovering his own mother's wartime secrets.

Noah is only days away from his first trip back to Nice since he was a child when a social worker calls looking for a temporary home for Michael, his eleven-year-old great-nephew. Though he has never met the boy, he gets talked into taking him along to France.

This odd couple, suffering from jet lag and culture shock, argue about everything from steak haché to screen time, and the trip is looking like a disaster. But as Michael's ease with tech and sharp eye help Noah unearth troubling details about their family’s past, both of them come to grasp the risks that people in all eras have run for their loved ones, and find they are more akin than they knew.

Written with all the tenderness and psychological intensity that made Room a huge bestseller, Akin is a funny, heart-wrenching tale of an old man and a boy who unpick their painful story and start to write a new one together.

I'm really looking forward to our book club discussion on this one. I'm sure the ladies in our group will have many more insights.