...[an] unbearable but transcendent debut novel ... In its blend of realism and fantasy, cruelty and beauty, the book itself affirms the value of mischling ... the aesthetic achievement of Mischling cannot redeem the world after Auschwitz. It merely illuminates it, woefully, brilliantly.
Ms. Konar makes the emotional lives of her two spirited narrators piercingly real ... What is most haunting about the novel is Ms. Konar’s ability to depict the hell that was Auschwitz, while at the same time capturing the resilience of many prisoners ... [certain] plot points can seem melodramatic and contrived, and Ms. Konar’s prose occasionally eddies into self-consciously pretty writing...but these doubts are steamrollered by Ms. Konar’s ability to powerfully convey the experiences of her heroines.
Konar’s novel takes an unorthodox, though not unprecedented, approach to these horrors: She describes them beautifully, lyrically, in the language of a fable. Mischling is not for everyone, not least because it is excruciating to read about such pain. I do not remember the last time I shed so many tears over a work of fiction. And it will surely offend those who still chafe at the idea of fictionalizing the Holocaust. But readers who allow themselves to fall under the spell of Konar’s exceptionally sensitive writing may well find the book unforgettable.
Konar draws us quickly from that familiar landscape to the bizarre world of the Zoo, focusing on the twins’ special bond ... The novel’s second half takes place after the camp’s liberation. Konar constructs a sinuous plot from the chaos of the postwar landscape. The faster pace frees her from the burden of having the children quite so lyrically narrate their own suffering ... Readers’ reactions to the novel will largely depend on how they feel about touring the Zoo with Konar as guide, rather than learning about this cruelty in a more documentary format — or from an actual survivor.
[Mischling] works, as much as possible, which is to say partly ... Konar is sensitive to the sleights of hand the twins adapt to survive. They sometimes caper or cavort. And yet the book does not seem gimmicky or glib ... That Stasha can express that possibility feels hopeful and extraordinary. And that’s what bothers me. It’s not really Konar’s fault, per se. It’s just I don’t know if I’ll ever be able to read a happy ending (even a small, partial one) in a novel about the Holocaust when, in the balance of history, so many were slaughtered.
This is not an easy novel to read, but Affinity Konar’s evocative storytelling, fierce characters and haunting prose make Mischling equally hard to put down ... Pearl and Stacha are enduring, endearing characters that readers of their saga won’t be able to forget.
One danger lies in the exploitation of horror, the artifice involved in a novelist’s straining toward language, attempting to prove its vividness in the face of extremity. The result, in the case of Mischling, is a failure of honesty, a failure (dare I say) of humility. Instead, we see the writer pointing toward herself ... Although there are plenty of lucid images throughout the novel, there are too many others that approach near-meaninglessness.
Mischling is a novel that walks rather bravely into this fraught territory — both the history of the Holocaust and that of its representation. And it is, above all, an act of empathy ... Paradoxically, Mischling’s reliance on a familiarly shabby, twinkly-eyed Eastern Europeanness, is both its strength and its weakness. It’s weak because it’s vague, a cliché. And yet this sentimentality lends the novel some welcome knowability ... What really saves Mischling is Konar’s astonishing lyricism ... Though it may be overly reliant on well-worn tropes Mischling is a very powerful novel. Gripping and grim in equal measure, and beautifully, sometimes exquisitely, written.
