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Two novels, set in two countries, share one theme: how people suffer and struggle to survive against the backdrop of World War II.
Classic war films and novels recount bloody battles and soldiers' violent, noble deaths.
But in her debut novel, The Madonnas of Leningrad, Debra Dean offers a sensitive portrayal of the non-combatants who suffer on the home front: Those people whose scarring wounds are caused by hunger, sickness, loneliness and deprivation.
The novel is based on actual events surrounding Russia's efforts to save the Hermitage and its artwork during the 900-day siege of Leningrad, which began in 1941.
Nearly 2,000 employees and family members lived in the museum's damp basement and worked tirelessly to pack up and relocate more than 1 million works of art.
Madonnas is a two-pronged story about memories and imagination told mostly through the docent Marina, a young woman who barely survives the siege by eating glue, linseed oil and small bread rations made with wood shavings. Some aren't as fortunate.
Under the tutelage of one of the museum's elderly caretakers, Marina takes on the task of memorizing the details of every painting in the museum.
Many decades later, she is living in the USA, and she has Alzheimer's disease. Just as the wartime siege trapped her in the Hermitage, the disease has locked her into a world of confusion.
It's the reader's good fortune that Dean chooses to tell much of her story in the confines of an art museum.
Her descriptive passages and dialogue are painteresque and exquisitely drawn. They bring to life wonderful paintings as well as the tortured lives of Leningrad's residents.
London's wartime community didn't lack for suffering or deprivation, but dying from malnutrition, as did many of its Leningrad counterparts, wasn't so common.
Home-front victims were more likely to die during the nightly bombing raids, hence the title of Sarah Waters' new novel, The Night Watch.
Waters, the author of Affinity, Fingersmith and Tipping the Velvet, usually places her stories in Victorian England. Pulling off a novel in wartime London is a tribute to her ability to give her readers a fresh, provocative story.
Waters' compelling protagonists, lesbian and heterosexual, are linked by historical events, romances and catastrophes.
Her novel flows backward from 1947 to 1944 to 1941. That we have to wait so long to understand how some of the characters know each other adds to the book's curious complexity.
Helen and Julia can't show affection for each other in public, and Helen is madly jealous of any woman who speaks to Julia.
Viv is involved with a married man, and she shares the same predicament. She can't be seen with him, knows he will not leave his wife but nearly dies from an abortion so he doesn't think she's trying to trap him.
The Night Watch's most memorable character is Kay, who dresses like a man, falls in love easily and whose bravery is tested nightly as she drives an ambulance through the bombed-out streets.
Male characters are not as powerfully drawn, nor are they as easy to understand.
And while the novel's lesbians seem confident in their sexuality, the men who "might" be gay seem confused by their feelings.
Not as dark or lust-filled as her Victorian novels, The Night Watch is still sexually and psychologically provocative.
The characters' non-mainstream lifestyle choices breathe new life into a time-honored but time-worn genre.
The Madonnas of Leningrad
By Debra Dean
William Morrow, 228 pp., $23.95
The Night Watch
By Sarah Waters
Riverhead, 446 pp., $25.95
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