Blooms of Darkness

“Majestic and humane . . . like Anne Frank’s diary—a work to which it will draw justified comparison.”
—David Leavitt, The New York Times Book Review
 
 “Appelfeld is fiction’s foremost chronicler of the Holocaust. The stories he tells, as here in Blooms of Darkness, are small, intimate, and quietly narrated and yet are transfused into searing works of art by Appelfeld’s profound understanding of loss, pain, cruelty, and grief.”
—Philip Roth

“I love Aharon Appelfeld’s Blooms of Darkness.  How can this great novelist still find fresh ways of telling the terrible story of those years? There’s nothing reflexive or familiar in here, each sentence is exquisitely judged; we read with the same astonishment and trepidation as if it was all happening now, and for the first time.  It’s so sad, and yet it’s also all told through the child’s appetite for life, and with unquenched curiosity and hopefulness.  We inhabit those things, taking refuge as Hugo does in the bliss of the moment—because, after all, what else is there?”
—Tessa Hadley, “The Year in Reading,” The New Yorker

“Succeeds brilliantly as a gripping tale of Holocaust survival, but on this occasion, Appelfeld’s literary imagination achieves a great deal more, creating a lyrically rendered story of adolescent sexual awakening, confusion, and love that gestures toward the painful inevitability of loss in any life. Above all, as is often the case with Appelfeld’s most powerful works, Blooms of Darkness is an eloquent meditation on the resources of the mind, the consolations of memory, and the imagination under duress.”
—The Forward 

“An unadorned and heartbreaking tale of a young boy coming of age during World War II . . . Poignant and tender without being sentimental, the novel achieves its powerful emotive effects through simplicity and understatement—a beautiful read.”
—Kirkus Reviews, starred

“A simple story that encapsulates the joy and sadness of a coming-of-age novel with the trauma of a world in the midst of destruction. The lean, spare prose does not shy away from harsh realities . . . A powerful novel.”   
—Publishers Weekly