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Summary
Summary
A wonderful fiction debut, Being Esther gives voice to Esther Lustig, an extraordinary woman who has lived a conventional life, in this touching exploration of aging.
In spare, unsentimental prose, Miriam Karmel provides readers with one of literature's finest portraits of the last months of a woman's life. Sad and amusing, unpretentious and ambitious, Karmel's prose brings understanding and tremendous empathy to the character of Esther Lustig, a woman who readers will recognize and embrace. Born to parents who fled the shtetl, Esther Lustig has led a seemingly conventional life -- marriage, two children, a life in suburban Chicago. Now, at the age of 85, her husband is deceased, her children have families of their own, and most of her friends are gone. Even in this diminished condition, life has its moments of richness, as well as its memorable characters. Being Esther reflects the need, as Esther puts it, for better roadmaps for growing old.
Author Notes
Miriam Karmel has worked professionally as a newspaper reporter and magazine editor, and most recently as a freelance writer specializing in medicine and health. Her journalism has appeared in AARP magazine and for many years in Minnesota Women''s Press . Her fiction has won numerous regional prizes, and her stories have been published in Bellevue Literary Review , Minnesota Monthly , as well as anthologized in Milkweed''s Fiction on a Stick (2008). She lives in Minneapolis, MN and Sandisfield, MA. Being Esther is her first novel. Finding the right container by Miriam Karmel I''ve always been a writer. I produced my first awkward efforts on my parents'' clunky old Royal. It was a heavy, metal machine with a black-and-red striped ribbon and fat, pearly keys. I couldn''t yet read, but I loved pounding the keys, then ripping the paper from the roller and showing it off to my mother. I''d like to think that she praised me for all that gibberish. Or perhaps my random jottings were as remarkable as those of the chimpanzee who types Shakespeare by chance. What does it matter? Gibberish or Shakespeare, I loved putting words on paper.Later, I wrote letters to friends at summer camp. I was stuck at home with parents who didn''t ''believe'' in camp, as if going away for the summer was a matter of faith. I entertained myself by writing what I believed were hilarious dispatches from the home front. I advanced to reporting for a newspaper, where I had a regular beat. And I wrote for magazines. Over the years, I''ve written op-ed pieces and essays, short stories and even poems, though I am not a poet. Being Esther began as a short story called ''Bingoville.'' It starts with a passage describing the way Esther and her friend Lorraine check in with each other every morning by phone. After I finished the story, I couldn''t stop thinking about Esther. How does she spend her days? What does she eat for breakfast? What are her fears? What does she wear? What does she think about this thing or that? What did she do when she was young? I couldn''t let go.Every story, fact or fiction, needs a container. Poets know that best. They seek a particular form to contain their words. Ode. Sonnet. Free verse. Sestina. Haiku. Or sometimes the poet adheres to a form as a way of opening up new possibilities or new territories for expression. Either way, form is chosen with intention. The story I wanted to tell, about an old woman coming to terms with the meaning of her life, felt right as fiction. ''Bingoville,'' the original Esther story, was contained inthe short form. When I realized that I wasn''t finished with Esther, I knew that I needed a larger container. I wrote a novel.I could have done otherwise. I could have interviewed gerontologists and psychologists, older people and the children of older people, then packaged all my findings into a magazine article, with some irksome title like, ''Growing Old Ain''t for Sissies.'' The article might even begin with an anecdote about an older woman, like Esther, who calls a friend every morning to ensure that each has made it through another night. The article would go on to offer advice from experts on how to talk to momabout giving up the car keys or how to keep mom safe in her own home. There''d be a sidebar: 10 Tips for Staying Independent.That story would be practical and informative. But it wasn''t the story I wanted to tell. I wanted to write about what it feels like to be old. I wanted to write about the struggle to maintain one''s dignity as the body, and sometimes the mind, defeats us.I did research, of course. I read books on aging. I read the diaries of older women. I listened to friends'' stories about how they were dealing with aging parents. Some of that found a way into Being Esther. I made it up! Being Esther is my invention. I don''t know anyone exactly like Esther Lustig. And I don''t know what it feels like to be very old. Fiction gave me the license to explore that feeling. I was free to inhabit the body of an old woman, to feel what it is like to be Esther.I''ve been asked how I came to fiction after a long career in journalism. I haven''t at long last arrived at fiction. I simply chose to tell a story in a different form. Perhaps in my dotage, I''ll be pounding the keys again, producing reams of gibberish. For now, it feels good to know that I could tell a story in novel form.
Reviews (3)
Publisher's Weekly Review
The heroine of Karmel's meandering debut novel is Esther Lustig, an 85-year-old widow who has led a quiet, middle-class Jewish life in the Chicago suburbs. Confronting the inevitability of death and the gradual diminishment of her faculties, Esther rummages through the past-from her marriage to an overbearing man, to her difficult relationship with her daughter, to thoughts (and even, a little more than thoughts) of romance with other men. Increasingly alone as her friends die or fade away, Esther regrets a life led without risk, and struggles to stay independent when her children try to put her in a home. The narrative progresses through loosely tied vignettes of the past and present, which dwell on the muted struggles and triumphs confronting an elderly woman whose life is defined by her ordinariness and quiet dignity. With its too-easy melancholy, the unremarkable plot is unfortunately matched by flavorless prose, and in the end, little insight is gained into Esther. The novel has graceful moments that aspire to the heights of Grace Paley or Alice Munro, but the overall effect is forgettable. (Apr.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Kirkus Review
Over the course of her last days, widowed Esther Lustig, 85 years old and determined to avoid being placed in Cedar Shores (aka Bingoville), reflects upon her life. A photograph from the past sparks this tale. Snapped in 1944, two weeks before Esther's date died in the war, the picture shows Esther with her best friends, who had spontaneously jumped on stage, mugging for the camera as an imaginative girl band, the Starrlites. Now Esther wants to find her friend Sonia. As Esther's narrative toggles back and forth between her past and her present, she worries whether she has made any lasting impression upon the world. Born to parents raised in a Polish shtetl, Esther learned modesty and frugality, neither of which appealed to her haughty mother-in-law, Toots Lustig, who chided her rustic cooking skills. Her husband, Marty, ate like a horse but strayed from his marital vows. Esther recalls her attraction to Marty but also her frustration with his domineering manner. Orbiting around Esther are her family, particularly Ceely, who is mysteriously angry with Esther and eager to shuffle her into a nursing home; her friends, several of whom have died or sunk into dementia; and the outside world, filled with rude and well-meaning people, all of whom treat Esther as an insignificant old woman. An awkward phone call to Sonia's husband, a showdown with a rude customer at the market, a barely expressed quarrel with Ceely--these scenes, like a collection of photographs, accrue and build toward Esther's acceptance of her past, which leaves her ready to slip into the next world. Karmel's debut novel is a quiet contemplation of a woman's final days.]] Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Booklist Review
Widowed and in her mid-eighties, Esther checks in with her friend Lottie each morning to confirm that each has made it through the night. But there is no way that she's going to surrender to her bossy daughter, Ceely, and move into an assisted living facility, which she disdainfully calls Bingoville. In her first novel, Karmel takes an understated and disarming approach to the closing years in the life of a seemingly ordinary woman, imbuing Esther with a subtle but zingy wit and underappreciated intelligence. Esther reflects on her mother's frostiness and her mother-in-law's acid tongue, her own passion for books, the grinding disappointments and late-blooming joys of her marriage, and Ceely's harrowing incommunicado years. Brimming with keen observations yet slow to articulate them due to her body's strange new hesitations, Esther is appalled by how strangers treat her as an object of concerned looks and condescension. Karmel's novel of womanhood, the love and strife between mothers and daughters, marital dead zones, and the baffling metamorphosis of age is covertly complex, quietly incisive, and stunning in its emotional richness.--Seaman, Donna Copyright 2010 Booklist