Book 19: The Postmistress

Finished: April 7
Pages: 326

I didn't think that I was going to like this book, based on the first few pages. It was a very weird beginning. I mean, who starts a book with a woman at the doctor's office getting a certificate to verify her virginity? The first hundred pages or so didn't hold my interest; though I enjoyed the character of Frankie from the beginning, it was easy to put down.
Then you get to the meat of the story, Summer 1941. You see the connections of the people sitting at home listening to the radio, across the wires to the reporters sitting in front of the microphones, hoping to reach someone on the other end. You see the suffering and the pain that comes from being like Cassandra, you talk and talk and no one seems to hear, or even if they hear, to heed the warnings. I guess it seems likely that there would have been signs of what the Nazis had planned for the Jews of Europe long before the concentration camps came to light.
I have always had a love/hate relationship with journalists, because I cannot understand standing by, watching horrible things happen, and doing nothing to stop it. Yes, I understand that the story itself is important. Yes, I understand that if you help one person, then where do you stop? But I can understand why the things that Frankie saw are things that broke her a little, and I can applaud that she felt obligated to try to help people, even though, in the end we see the consequences of those actions. I can feel angry at Murrow and other journalists who ridiculed her lack of objectivity, her lack of immediate identifiable purpose.
Aspects of the story made me so angry, but it was more the immediate realism of the Blitz itself, of what it felt like to be an American in the face of the suffering of people just trying to get to America that really got under my skin. I've heard stories of the Holocaust, I've heard stories of what it felt like to try to get out, of being a Jew in these countries, but not the perspective of what an outsider would feel. As an outsider myself, I appreciate this perspective. I appreciate the burden that Frankie feels in the face of that story.

"They are just sound. Voices without a story. People need to know why they are listening and what they are being asked to hear."
"Or they won't understand?"
"They won't listen." (118)

The tragedies for me seemed appropriately poetic. That the doctor didn't meet death in a bomb, but looking the wrong way in traffic was perfect because he had to die, and it should have been that kind of death: typically American. An American student studying abroad when I was in London was hit by a bus just this way. It just makes sense to me. Otto facing all the prejudice made sense to me, and was so tragic because other people refused to acknowledge what they were doing, they were so caught up in fear. I am glad, however, that the final tragedy was not something involving Otto, because that would have been too trite. I loved the addition of the story of Theseus and the black sails, I loved Frankie's understanding and response to that story, and the perfection of that tragedy:

"Theseus could have fixed it. If only he had known. [...] I've never gotten over the waste of that accident," Iris said quietly.
"But the story knew."
"I beg your pardon?"
"The story"--Frankie nodded, still not quite sure what she was saying--"it knew. The story wouldn't have mattered without the mistake. If Theseus had remembered to change the sails, the things wouldn't have been told. The story would have ended, as they all do, with the hero's triumphant return. But that mistake made the story. That mistake is the story. that's why it's told."
Iris stared. "You can really be so coldhearted."
"It's a myth, Miss James," Frankie went on, exhausted. "Mistakes happen all the time."

And how true it is, that mistakes, looking left instead of right, running into one bomb shelter instead of the other, meeting a friend and stopping to say hello or going on ahead, happen all the time.

Good Reading,
Caitlin