Leigh Charlton, News Editor
@leighcourant
A review of Salt to the Sea by Ruta Sepetys.
When the Titanic sank, it dragged 1,500 people with it to the bottom of the Atlantic. On the Lusitania, 1,200 were lost. The fall of these ships rocked the Western world.
In January of 1945, 9,343 people, many of them children, went down with the Wilhelm Gustloff in the Baltic Sea. Before cracking open Salt to the Sea, a novel by Ruta Sepetys, I had never even heard of it.
The book is narrated from the perspective of four main characters: Joana, a nurse; Emilia, a pregnant Polish girl; Florian, a government agent, and Alfred, a brainwashed sociopath. At the end of World War II, Joana, Florian, and Emilia are part of a mob of refugees fleeing the Soviet advance through East Prussia. The three of them make for their ticket to freedom: the ill-fated Wilhelm Gustloff, a passenger ship where the fourth character, Alfred, works. When the ship is attacked, all four of them must struggle for their survival.
My thoughts:
This literary masterpiece was every bit as beautiful as its companion, Between Shades of Gray, a book that followed Soviet deportations of educated people and families. Once again, I cannot believe that a tragedy of this scale is so obscure.
Sepetys combines human compassion, survival instinct, and jarring, horrific detail in a flawless historical novel. Through her research, she uncovers facts so upsetting that they never made their way into my school history books. It is these moments, interwoven with the narrative, that adds gravity to her writing. These single-sentence knockouts deliver such a powerful blow that it reverberates through the pages- a shudder that makes me put the book down and take a moment to appreciate what I have been blessed with. The panic, chaos, uncertainty and sheer desperation of World War II Europe is unimaginable.
Sepetys also did such a wonderful job with the four narrating characters, as well as the secondary characters that they encountered. Alfred, in particular, was a work of art.
He is brilliantly conceived and written. The sharp contrast between the letters that he mentally composed to his “sweetheart,” in which he described a fictitious lofty role in the Nazi party and the reality of his low station was beyond freaky. Alfred is the chilling representative of the brainwashed sociopaths who swallowed Hitler’s words like hot chocolate. I genuinely despised him. The disparity between his twisted beliefs and the compassion of the other characters is brilliant and terrifying.
Another feature of Sepetys’s writing that I love is how the characters nickname the people around them. Characters come to be known by a defining trait or habit. This adds depth and familiarity to the casualties who would otherwise be flat, black statistics on the paper. It shows the humanity of the people that suffered and died together.
Ultimately, this book was able to simultaneously tug at my heartstrings and make me reevaluate what I thought I knew about history. It was gorgeous.
5/5 stars.
★★★★★
