2009.05.25
Review: Random Acts of Heroic Love
Random Acts of Heroic Love
by Danny Scheinmann
Thomas Dunne Books
400 pages, $24.95
Reviewed by Tom Jones
Well received in the U.K. when first published in 2007, Danny Scheinmann’s emotionally charged debut novel arrived in U.S. book stores in late January. It contains two seemingly disparate stories, each featuring a young man whose obsession with the love of his life controls his every thought and deed. Through them Scheinmann skillfully explores the issues of love and survival, grief and bereavement, and ultimately, hope and redemption.
Leo Deakin is inconsolable when he awakens in an Ecuadorian hospital in 1992 and is told that Eleni, his Greek girlfriend had died in an accident that he survived. She had been his soul mate, the center of his universe. Paralyzed by guilt, remorse and grief, Leo attempts to return to his PhD studies in Biology in London, but to no avail. Though he is only 25, he experiences the deep sense of bereavement of one who had lost a wife and lover of many years. His friends are extremely supportive and sympathetic, but become weary of the never-ending intensity of the level of his grief, and eventually are driven away.
The second story is about the sustaining strength of love and the magnitude of its influence. In 1914 Austrian teen-ager Mortiz Daniecki shares a single kiss with Lotte before going off to fight the Russians. Soon he is engulfed in all of the horrors of WWI, and it is only the memory of that kiss that spurs him on. Death and destruction are everywhere; all of his childhood friends have been killed. When captured by the Russians and sent to a Siberian prison camp he can only think of escaping the unbearable conditions and returning to Lotte who is now over 4 thousand miles away. Thus begins the epic tale of Mortiz’s two year walk across Russia and his turbulent arrival in Vienna within days of Lotte’s marriage to another.
In an effort to break through Leo’s grief, his father who heretofore had been a quiet unassuming and unemotional cipher reveals the secret of his lineage and background. His Jewish parents, Mortiz and Lotte, had sent him to England in 1938 to escape the Nazis. The story of Mortiz’s love for his grandmother, and his arduous journey to return to her becomes the key to Leo’s redemption.
The two narratives are effectively interspersed, beautifully written and heart wrenching. As if compelled to create the quintessential story about the power of love, Scheinmann spent six years writing this book, and he got it right.
Tom Jones is President of the Southwest Virginia branch of the English Speaking Union.
