Katherine Ashenburg

Vale of tears

‘Some places are drenched with sorrow,’ a character in The Winter Vault tells his son, and the son reflects that some people are like that too.

issue 06 June 2009

‘Some places are drenched with sorrow,’ a character in The Winter Vault tells his son, and the son reflects that some people are like that too.

‘Some places are drenched with sorrow,’ a character in The Winter Vault tells his son, and the son reflects that some people are like that too. This book is full of sorrowful people and places. Some of the places, the villages sacrificed to create the Aswan Dam and Canada’s St Lawrence Seaway, are literally drowned, leaving thousands homeless, while Warsaw, ruined in the second world war and rebuilt to a Disneyesque twin of its past self, is also submerged in loss. In and around these stories of large-scale dispossession and destruction weave personal losses — dead parents, a stillborn baby, an estranged daughter. The plot, like a magnet drawn to doom and mourning, follows Avery, an engineer charged with constructing the Seaway and relocating the temple of Abu Simbel during the building of the Aswan Dam, and his botanist wife Jean.

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