In Brian Prousky's latest novel Uriel Through Eleanor, Uriel “Uri” Katz is an eighty-one-year-old bachelor living in Toronto, Canada. He is a Jewish World War Two veteran, and he has put an ad in the paper for a typist. Eleanor answers his ad, with demands and expectations rather than inquiry, and ends up moving in with Uri while she helps him write his memoir. She helps with more than typing, however, embellishing and smoothing things as they go, and she and Uri argue like cats and dogs. Her cooking persuades Uri to keep her around, though, and through their tales we learn that they aren’t, in fact, strangers; they have been connected ever since Uri helped liberate a concentration camp in Germany at the end of the War. Along the way, we meet wonderful characters like Danny, Frieda, and Bella, and we learn how the same horror affected them all so differently. There are a couple of twists, the second of which I did not see coming, and you will be holding your breath until the very last page.
While this book is fiction, the way Prousky tells his tale will have you second-guessing. The voices of Uri and Eleanor are well-defined and easily distinguished, and they feel utterly real. It is hard to believe, as you read, that they aren’t. Uri doesn’t tell his story in a completely linear fashion, due to his ideas about storytelling and Eleanor’s frequent interruptions, but it is easy to follow and develops at a good pace. The second part of the novel is when the story really takes off, and when we begin to learn the other side of Uri’s tale and why Eleanor is really there. The story has no loose ends, and it comes together beautifully, but be warned, this is an unflinching look into what liberation looked and felt like, and is not for the fainthearted.
Eleanor is aggravating at the beginning, but you come to love her as the story goes on, and, in the end, she is the glue holding it all together. Exploring the themes of secret-keeping, family, friendship, and the personal nature of trauma, Brian Prousky’s Uriel Through Eleanor is unputdownable for fans of fiction and nonfiction alike.
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