About Grace by Anthony Doerr

I loved his book All The Light We Cannot See, and when my book club choose this for the next read, I decided on another book by the same author. This novel is not an easy read. It took me more or less 200 pages before I felt that the story ran off with me. Usually, I don't wait that long to continue a book, but Anthony Doerr is different. His stories do engage you and the prose is so beautiful, it is a pleasure to read it, for this feature alone. From the back cover:

"Here Doerr tells, in luminous prose, the story of David Winkler, a man graced with the gift of premonition and plagued by a dream that foretells his daughter's death. He flees thousands of miles from his family and home in a desperate hope that his dream will not come true. Set in Alaska, Ohio, and the Caribbean, About Grace is a heartbreaking, radiant, and astonishingly accomplished novel about the tiny but lifesaving miracles happening around us at each moment, and about our longing for grace."

It is a very tragic story and you feel this sadness all through the novel. A man's gift of premonition can easily turn into a curse. It is easy to just take in the sadness of the story, but when you stop and think further, you do find, among all the misery, a few things, which might be the most important things in life. Winkler thinks a lot about how life is treating us, what we do, and don't do with our lives. What is time?:

"Did time move forward, through people, or did people move through it, like clouds across the sky?"

 ...

"What is time? he wrote in his pad. Must time occur in sequence - beginning to middle to end - or is this only one way to perceive it? Maybe time can spill and freeze and retreat; maybe time is like water, endlessly cycling through its states."

After his flight from his family, David Winkler ends up in St Vincent, with Felix and Soma and their children. They are refugees from Chile. He is welcomed into their family, and he creates a special bond with their daughter Naaliyah, who is the same age as Grace. He is a scientist and has a special interest in nature. In Naaliyah he finds a soulmate, and he teaches her on how nature is working. They become his new family.

When, finally, after 25 years, he decides to go back and find out whether his wife and child are still alive, his life turns into another loop. During the 25 years in the Caribbean he let life lead him wherever it took him. "The inn itself began to slump, as though it had simmered too long in a covered pot." The same could be said about himself. Finally, he takes his life in his own hands. Or, does he really? Is he not just moving into another timeframe and continue to let life take the lead?

"He marvelled at the indifference of the world, the way it kept on, despite everything."

He decides to go looking for Sandy and Grace. Like in his earlier life, he is once again pushed around by life rather than by his own decisions, maybe guided by his fears of what he will find.  "To enter a world of shadows is to leave this world for another."  Failing to find his family, he goes back to Anchorage where it all started.

"It was as if her vigil from the boat shed, decades earlier, had begun anew. In his clearer moments Winkler wondered if, sooner or later, every event recurred, if life consisted of a series of repeated patterns: the scar on his knee; now an injury to his foot. Viewed from above, maybe lives looked like matrices of color, scarves on a loom. He wondered: When I wandered out of that town, heading toward the airstrip, was I planning on coming back? Or was I trying, as I did with Nanton's rowboat, to let the world take me?"

There are a lot of layers in Winkler's story and life. Must family be blood bound, or could family be accidental. Could you be considered a family, living among friends, sharing their lives, their children, their sorrows and happiness? Being part of some kind of unity. Is life taking us on a ride, or is it possible to control it? Can we change our destiny?

"But what was family? Surely more than genes, eye color, flesh. Family was story: truth and struggle and retribution. Family was time. "

...

"But there was a worse feeling: the possibility that it didn't matter what he had done, that outcome was independent of choice, that action or inaction, no decision mattered, and his entire attempt at family was now dead and nobody was left to care whether he gave up or kept on."

I started saying this is a very sad and tragic story. It is. Part of the time I was irritated with Winkler and his lack of action. Why does he not speak up? Why does he not take his life in his own hands? What is he waiting for? As I said, not an easy read. Having finished the book, it did stay with me, made me face the big questions in our lives. Who are we? Are we able to control our actions, or are we bound by destiny?  What have we become? And why? And how does time affects our life? Is there any hope for Winkler in the end? I was really hoping there was, but will not spoil the end for you who intend to read it. The book is definitely worth reading, if not solely for the story itself, but also for the prose, the thought provoking comments and a look at life from another angle. The beautiful prose, which makes the novel a pleasure to read, in spite of the difficult story. Just look at the quotes here. Much more where these come from.