Lovely Green Eyes: A Novel

by Arnost Lustig Narrated by Michael Page

Overview

“A moving act of absolution.... This strong novel about a girl who is debased but never destroyed pushes the reader to a new level of understanding of the things people do-and the things that are done to them.” -Washington Post Book World

She has hair of ginger and lovely green eyes, and she has just been transported with her family from Terezín to Auschwitz. In short order, her father commits suicide, and her mother and younger brother are dispatched to the gas chambers, but fifteen-year-old Hanka Kauderzová is still alive. Faced with the choice of certain death in the camp or working in a German military brothel, she chooses a chance at life. Passing for an Aryan, Hanka spends her days in the brothel cold, hungry, fearful, and ashamed. She is sustained only by her loathing of the men who visit her and by a fierce, indomitable will to live.

This devastatingly beautiful novel explores and delineates the impossible choices one sometimes has to make in life, when the fabric of the world is rent asunder. Soaring beyond the nightmare, it leaves the reader with a transcendent sense of hope.

Editorial Reviews

Publishers Weekly

Prague-born Lustig (The Bitter Smell of Almonds) adds this chronicle of a resilient teenage girl to his highly regarded oeuvre of spare and haunting novels rooted in the Holocaust. The "lovely green eyes" of the title belong to 15-year-old Hanka "Skinny" Kaudersova, a shy, ginger-haired girl and the only member of her family to avoid death in Auschwitz. At first a cleaner in a camp hospital lab (where the doctor sterilizes her), she continues to evade extermination by lying about her age and her heritage (passing herself as Aryan) and is requisitioned as a prostitute in the German military field brothels. In a typical workday, Hanka services at least a dozen soldiers, many of whom are distraught and violent. Lustig presents the brothel clients as fully rounded characters, both viciously prejudiced against Jews and kind to the (Czech, they think) girl whose body they use. Constant hunger, freezing temperatures and disease further weaken Skinny's spirit, but as the war ends, she realizes she must search for her place in a world built on ashes. A rabbi, who is himself drowning in despair, attempts to offer her solace, but she's unable to shed her shame and guilt. Back in Prague, agonized by nightmarish memories, she settles in with a group of survivors and meets the narrator, whose declaration of love eventually thaws her heart. Lustig's prose is evocative at the same time it is sparse, even during harrowing scenes of physical and mental cruelty. Aided by a fine translation, this is a stunning work, worthy of comparison to those by Elie Wiesel and Primo Levi. In imagining the ordeal of a young girl "who had looked on the devil 12 times a day," Lustig has created an unforgettable character within whom "remembrance and oblivion contended," but who still summons the courage to affirm life. (May) Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information.

Library Journal

A Feldhure, or army prostitute, working in Feldbordell No. 232 Ost somewhere near the eastern front during World War II, Skinny is known to the German soldiers who frequent the camp brothel as Lovely Green Eyes. Managing to pass as a gentile and lying about her age the 15-year-old comes by her position after her entire family perishes at Auschwitz-Birkenau. In the brothel, her daily quota is a dozen German soldiers, sometimes more, back from the front. With the sparest prose whose harrowing monotone only increases our sensation of horror, the author covers Skinny's daily routine amid the executions, medical experiments, gassings, and incinerations that are the fabric of camp life. This includes listening in her cubicle to the rantings of German officers convinced that the Reich will last forever. With this highly original novel, written in the tradition of bearing witness, Lustig (The Bitter Smell of Almonds), himself a survivor of the death camps, brings our understanding one step closer to the abyss in which countless millions died. Recommended for all literary collections. Edward Cone, New York Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information.

Kirkus Reviews

The latest (2000) novel from the Czech author of more than a dozen fictional treatments of the Holocaust and its aftershocks tells the grim story of 15-year-old Hanka Kaudersova, who survives Auschwitz by serving as a prostitute for its Nazi masters. The intense narrative focuses as well on both a thoughtful German officer who lectures Hanka about the "beauty" of slaughter and on an impotent sadomasochist who's Hitlerism incarnate, then follows Hanka through war's end, repentance for her "sins," and salvation via marriage. Lustig's penchants for abstract and flat statement dilute his story's force. But Lovely Green Eyes does rein in a lot of the hyperbole that marred much of his earlier fiction; as a result, this is one of this very uneven writer's better efforts.

From the Publisher

“A moving act of absolution . . . . This strong novel about a girl who is debased but never destroyed pushes the reader to a new level of understanding of the things people do—and the things that are done to them.”—Washington Post Book World

“Absolutely incendiary reading, frightening and compelling in its authority . . .
appeals by its feather-light touch.” —Review of Contemporary Fiction

“Lovely Green Eyes could be described in the words of Mr. Kertesz’s Nobel citation, which praised ‘writing that upholds the fragile experience of the individual against the barbaric arbitrariness of history.’. . . A work of extraordinary delicacy.”—Washington Times

“A moving act of absolution . . . . This strong novel about a girl who is debased but never destroyed pushes the reader to a new level of understanding of the things people do—and the things that are done to them.”—Washington Post Book World

“Absolutely incendiary reading, frightening and compelling in its authority . . .
appeals by its feather-light touch.” —Review of Contemporary Fiction

“Lovely Green Eyes could be described in the words of Mr. Kertesz’s Nobel citation, which praised ‘writing that upholds the fragile experience of the individual against the barbaric arbitrariness of history.’. . . A work of extraordinary delicacy.”—Washington Times

Product Details

BN ID:	2940173403056
Publisher:	Brilliance Audio
Publication date:	07/04/2017
Edition description:	Unabridged

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