Published March 2016 by Little, Brown and Company
9 Hours, 40 Minutes
Read by Juliet Stevenson
Publisher's Summary:
A woman discovers that the foreigner she thinks will redeem her life is a notorious war criminal.
Vlad, a stranger from Eastern Europe masquerading as a healer, settles in a small Irish village where the locals fall under his spell. One woman, Fidelma McBride, becomes so enamored that she begs him for a child. All that world is shattered when Vlad is arrested, and his identity as a war criminal is revealed.
Fidelma, disgraced, flees to England and seeks work among the other migrants displaced by wars and persecution. But it is not until she confronts him-her nemesis-at the tribunal in The Hague, that her physical and emotional journey reaches its breathtaking climax.
The Little Red Chairs is a book about love, and the endless search for it. It is also a book about mankind's fascination with evil, and how long, how crooked, is the road towards Home.
My Thoughts:
I've been hearing the name Edna O'Brien for years and long thought I needed to pick up some of her work. At some point, this is the one I put on my list of books to read. I don't know that I even then knew what it was about, just that it was her latest (at 85!) book. I don't know what I was expecting but it certainly wasn't what I got - I never could have imagined what I got.
The Little Red Chairs starts as one kind of book but quickly turns to an entirely different kind of book. It opens with the arrival of Dr. Vladimir Dragon in a small Irish village, filled with the kind of quirky characters (although O'Brien's characters are not caricatures; they are fully realized people) you'd expect to find in one. There is a gossip, there is humor, there is a book club where most of the members can't find the message in the books they read.
It doesn't take long for readers to begin to understand that Dr. Vlad is not at all the person he claims to be, not a mysterious healing man but a man on the run from international authorities. It take longer for the villagers to see him for what he is; by then he has won them over, actually providing healing for many of them. So they are shocked to see television footage of him being hauled off of a bus, wanted for committing war crimes including the murder of thousands during the siege of Sarajevo (he is modeled on the real war criminal, Radovan Karadzic, the Butcher of Bosnia). For Fidelma, though, the harm he has caused will forever change her life. She has fallen in love with him and he has given her the child she has long wanted. But, because of who he is, the child will be taken from her in a scene that is so brutal I wish that I could forget it but fear I never will.
The story keeps changing. When Fidelma flees Ireland, the story turns to one of the refugee women Fidelma becomes involved with, their stories of their homelands and the troubles they continue to face. We find ourselves in a dreamscape, where Dr. Dragan is visited by an old friend who recounts Dragan's crimes. Finally, we are in The Hague, where Fidelma travels to witness Dr. Vlad's trial and to visit him, to make him understand the harm he caused to her.
In reviews by people who really know how to review a book, you'll find words like "genius" and "masterpiece." It's another of those situations where I wonder what I missed in a book. Maybe if I had read it, rather than listening to it, it would have had a greater impact, would have felt more cohesive. It's not that I didn't find a lot to like about this book. Maybe the genius of the book, for me, was in the way that O'Brien created so many characters that we became deeply involved with. Maybe it was in the way that she showed how good and evil live together. But I'll be honest with you, despite there being things that will stay with me from this book, I can't, a couple of weeks after finishing it, remember how it ended.
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