...[a] radiant new novel ... Signaling from the start that it will give nonstop beauty and insight, the novel repays close attention with what the best fiction can bestow: a larger, deeper understanding of the spinning world. Reminiscent at times of the work of poet/novelist Anne Michaels, every word here feels set down with care and fierce conscience. The resulting narrative glows as if distilled ... Winter Kept Us Warm is deeply concerned with what makes a family, with inevitable, unanswerable loss, with the intricacies of language and time; love and war, friendship, the life of art and the imagination, and always (borrowing from Yeats) the quest of the 'pilgrim soul.' In other words, just about everything that ever mattered. The novel’s own quest is one in which we can happily lose — and find — ourselves.
This kind of drama is quiet and subtle, but Raeff knows how to wield her words in this space, and makes small pronouncements devastating ... Indeed, one of the most remarkable things about the novel is how quiet it is, and how much respectful space Raeff allows her characters. While their inner thoughts and feelings are sometimes conveyed in a sentence or two, as above, Raeff largely documents these without dwelling there. This isn't a book obsessed with its people's thoughts, and there are no long paragraphs of internal monologues. Instead, these characters are in the thick of their lives, and Raeff shows us their fullness in quick sketches, the way a skilled artist may convey movement and attitude with only a few penciled lines.
Raeff’s latest speaks to the present. There’s nothing dated or quaint about the three individuals around which she centers her story, and the lack of period embroidery — no archaic brand names, beauty rituals, or descriptions of old-timey radios — keeps it streamlined. The characters don’t spend 304 pages pontificating about the nature of good and evil, but like anyone living through history they try to make sense of the world, one failure and one victory at a time ... In this author’s nimble hands, the struggle for love, safety, and meaning feels palpable as the reader watches each character scour various routes toward those ends, only some of which prove fruitful. Raeff’s great achievement is having assembled a cast so recognizably flawed that it’s easy to root empathetically for their contentment, even as she calls the potential for contentment into question by suggesting that inherent morality — human goodness — may be a lie we tell ourselves so we can sleep at night.
The novel is a profound success that manages to take its place in the canon of excellent war literature while also maintaining a kind of magical surreality—how could such tenderness endure when the world is ripped asunder? But it does. At moments, the narrative even veers into Gabriel García Márquez territory with its mastery of human complications and conditions, its holiness of unrequited love.
No matter what genre you choose to taxonomize this fine novel, it remains certain: this is an astounding read, a best-of, and a masterful treatise on enduring.
The material is here for an epic, and the frustration of Winter Kept Us Warm is that it’s been packed into too few pages, forcing Ms. Raeff to rush through the decades in her haste to catch up with the present. Many scenes feel merely summarized—a pity, because when she does fully imagine the past, as in her depiction of Berlin after the war, the results are memorable.
...[a] mesmerizing novel ... Richly depicting emotional interiority of its characters, Raeff’s novel reveals how the devastating effects of war and hidden secrets can impact lives across decades.
There’s elegance, insight, tenderness, and craft aplenty in this pensive, melancholy story, but its insistent restraint and distance bleach away intimacy; it’s as if readers are viewing the characters through the wrong end of a telescope.
