Nadine

Description

290 pages
$5.95
ISBN 0-14-008870-9
DDC C813'

Author

Year

1987

Contributor

Reviewed by Ellen Pilon

Ellen Pilon is a library assistant in the Patrick Power Library at Saint
Mary’s University in Halifax.

Review

Matt Cohen is a name which cannot escape the notice of diligent Canadian fiction readers: his name will remain among the finest twentieth-century Canadian novelists. Born in Kingston, Ontario, he attended the University of Toronto, then taught religious studies at McMaster before settling into full-time writing in Toronto. His published works to date include a quartet entitled “The Salem Novels,” collections of short stories, and another novel, The Spanish Doctor.

Nadine portrays the life of a Jewish girl born in Paris during World War II. Because of the German occupation, she was left by her parents with her aunt who, in turn, sent her to Toronto and the capable but cold arms of the Borstein couple. Her parents were killed in a German camp. In Toronto she encounters her uncle Piakowski, who affects her life, both physically and mentally, until after his death. She also meets Miller, who lives across the street and attends classes at the University of Toronto in her astronomy department.

The story shows the love triangle: Miller / Nadine / Amanda, with a subplot triangle Piakowski / Nadine / anyone else. We experience the Resistance in Paris, and Jews deciding what to do in occupied Paris — sometimes too late. Piakowski, Nadine, Miller, and Amanda are in the Department of Astronomy at the university: we see them at work, and learn of Miller’s discovery of a comet. Nadine, with Miller, travels to Israel where she is wounded by a grenade, symbolically a rebirth from the trauma experienced by her Jewish family in war.

Although this is a story of non-enduring relationships, it is a strongly optimistic one. One of Cohen’s themes is timing: people meet but the time is not always right for them to relate. Nadine meets Miller long before they are ready for one another: he has to work his way through Amanda and his post-comet mediocrity, while Nadine, although always loving Miller, has to come to terms with Piakowsky’s power over her and the rootlessness of her upbringing.

Cohen knows Nadine to the core, and it is proof of his excellence as a novelist that we readers come to understand Nadine even better than ourselves. She almost becomes real flesh and blood, teasing us long after the book is finished as we think about her decisions, her relationships, and her priorities.

Nadine is a joy to read, despite its beginnings in the Holocaust. The clouds of doom and gloom, although never far away, never engulf the residual joie de vivre that is in Nadine.

 

Citation

Cohen, Matt, “Nadine,” Canadian Book Review Annual Online, accessed January 8, 2025, https://cbra.library.utoronto.ca/items/show/34511.