There is a lovely bookstore in Winston Salem, NC called Bookmarks. And, they have various events - which often include bringing authors to town. While I rarely make the events, I do benefit from them because I see the books and read them. Some time ago, I think Ann Mah was in town - and that's why I ended reading her novel, The Lost Vintage.
I loved it.
I got terrifically engrossed in the novel, including the family background of characters, the ways contemporary events were linked to historical events, and the ways it mattered (and matters) that (the main) characters were women and experienced life in very distinct ways because they were women. The novel offered insight into the ways history is not a progress narrative - with things getting better and better for women - nor is it ever simple. I liked seeing the ways women's curiosity linked to science and, as importantly (and you will assume this from the title!) to wine and wine making. I also liked the ways the landscape and culture of Burgundy are highlighted by Mah.
Across generations we see women striving to succeed in relation to wine - and we see it happen as we also see it challenged by individual failings, world events, and more.
These days, for reasons I do not fully understand, we are seeing many many novels which connect our era to World War II. This is the case with this novel too - linking the many ways that French history of the WWII era was complicated, personal, and continues to shape the present. Yes, there is romance. There is pain. There are confusions between people who seem to be trying to understand one another. And, the long reach of history is evident in each of the characters in ways that are both obvious and unexpected.
I think the main theme I took from the novel, beyond the ways it resonated with the ways war leads to immigration which continue to reverberate today, and the very way that history matters. Ignoring history - ignoring the past - seems to me not to be wrong for simple reasons (like the cliched risk of repeating the past) but because of the risk of festering wounds. History matters because it shapes us - and because we are making tomorrow's pasts. If that makes sense.
And, in this novel, in nontrivial ways, history is also genealogical in both the every day and the scholarly meanings of that term. How families intertwine - and how a more Foucauldian genealogy transpires - are both lifted up in this novel.
Perhaps also relevant is the fact that Mah has been journalist and now novelist, writing nonfiction and fiction. She does so without blurring the fact/fiction distinction in the way contemporary politics does - perhaps because as she turned her eye to the horrors of WWII in France one of the realities she saw was one where the re-politicization of who counts as human and what counts as factual created tragedies that still shape us all. The moral dilemmas facing characters in this novel reverberate with those facing us each day. An enjoyable novel, The Lost Vintage does not, though, let us off the hook.
For a review of the novel, click here.
