Before
A Novel
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- $11.99
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
Over one September night on their small suburban street, the neighbors of Joseph Hurka's novel Before connect. Whether they're strangers, acquaintances, or ultimately closest allies, the familiar residents of a street in Hurka's Cambridge, Massachusetts, fascinate and terrify, and Hurka's debut novel offers us the depths of their strange and secret lives.
Seventy-three-year-old Jiri Posselt and his wife, Anna, are survivors of the Nazi horror in Czechoslovakia; they have befriended a neighbor named Tika LaFond, a college student who has faced great challenges of her own. And as night descends we meet another character, a man who enters the apartments of neighborhood women when they aren't home, taking a peculiar inventory of their lives.
We discover why this ghostly man, haunted terribly by his past, is so twisted. When he becomes increasingly violent and, in the early hours of morning, fixes his attention exclusively on Tika, it will fall to Jiri Posselt---weakened by age but an utterly determined soul---to help his young friend.
As we come to know the characters of Before through their own memories, we begin to understand their lives before terror affected them. As their lives converge, we see how good can work in the face of evil. And as they come to understand fully their own pasts in this thrilling and meticulously crafted fiction, we realize how the absolute power of knowledge and redemption can counter the true birthplaces of terror.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
A 73-year-old translator of Czech and German living in Cambridge, Mass., in early September 2001, Jiri Posselt is trying to recover after a series of strokes six months before. As part of the therapy to sharpen his memory, Jiri fills notebooks with flashbacks from his past, focusing on the 1942 Lidice massacre, which claimed the lives of his family along with those of their neighbors in reprisal for the Resistance killing of SS General Heydrich. Jiri and his wife, Anna, have befriended their neighbor Tika LaFond, a wide-eyed photography student with a big heart and a loose grasp of world history ("Why did the Nazis do it?" she asks) who mourns her parents' breakup and her tennis ace father's subsequent death in a car crash. As Jiri pieces together his painful past and Tika frets over her roommate's affair with a married man, a murderer stalks Tika. Although Tika is an anemic character compared to Jiri, and Hurka's (Fields of Light) motives for setting this novel on the eve of 9/11 are confounding (the timing also adds awkward symbolic weight to a bevy of plot elements), the novel offers a refreshing perspective on aging, identity and intergenerational bonds.