Adam Anker, born in Kraków, lives in an island house set above the sea. On the opposite side of the world, on another island, lives the mother of his daughter, a woman he last saw twenty years before. Like the blank space between them, Adam’s life is marked by blanks, spaces never filled in because Adam has no answers to the questions they ask, only silences. Now, at sixty, propelled by grief and a photograph in the Auckland Holocaust Gallery, he leaves his New Zealand home on a journey that will take him first to Kraków, then to the remote Swedish island where he made the decision that took him halfway around the world.
On the narrative level, Sonata for Miriam charts Adam’s quest to fill in the blanks that war left in his life. But the narrative shifts in time and shifts in person as it shifts in place, in truth a vehicle for the two narrators, Adam and Cecilia, to give shape to lives constructed around silences and losses created by love and circumstance — the blank spaces. Oblique, moving, written with great and rich precision, Olsson’s novel is less Adam’s story than a story of how men and women manage the lives that both they and forces beyond their control have made for them.
Maron L. Waxman, retired editorial director, special projects, at the American Museum of Natural History, was also an editorial director at HarperCollins and Book-of-the-Month Club.
