“Once upon a time, there was a beautiful village inside an ancient forest on the slope of a mountain that looked down upon the sea.” As the protagonist, Irini, repeats this chorus all through Christy Lefteri’s newest novel The Book of Fire, the phrases begin to really feel like an omen of tragedy as an alternative of a fairy-tale starting. One scorching summer season day, Irini’s idyllic Greek island village is irrevocably remodeled when a fireplace set by a person grasping to construct property burns out of management. Irini, her husband, Tasso, and her daughter, Chara, survive the hellish expertise with scars each seen and painfully unseen. In the hearth’s aftermath, Irini begins to document what occurred in a journal that she calls “The Book of Fire.” She can’t deliver herself to play her beloved music, very like how Tasso, an artist, can’t elevate his paintbrush. Her village—the village of her great-grandfather—is mourning the wonder and innocence it has misplaced together with the individuals who died. The villagers focus their collective grief and anger into hatred for the person who began the hearth. And but, in her confusion and ache, Irini wonders a couple of broader shared accountability for the devastation, asking, “Could there be something destructive and barren in all of us that bleeds out onto our land?”
Much like she did in Songbirds, which elevated the voices of migrant home staff, Lefteri attracts on actual occasions on this new novel, having traveled to Mati, Greece, to talk to locals in regards to the fireplace they endured in 2018. In The Book of Fire, Lefteri turns her delicate gaze to international local weather change and the way more and more prevalent lethal fires have develop into. Her zealousness in warning of the risks posed by our neglect of the land and its wants often veers into overt preaching, but this sense of urgency does propel the plot ahead. Her language, as at all times, is evocative and exact, and her story stays heartbreaking even because it inches towards therapeutic and the hope of restoration. Irini observes that the “fire has burnt our souls, our hearts. It has turned to ashes the people we once were,” however this stalwart neighborhood, like the traditional chestnut tree that figures prominently within the story, is “still alive . . . and its branches reach up to the sun.”
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