Lovely Green Eyes: A Novel

by Arnost Lustig Narrated by Michael Page

Overview

“A moving act of absolution.... This strong novel about a girl who is debased but never destroyed pushes the reader to a new level of understanding of the things people do-and the things that are done to them.” -Washington Post Book World

She has hair of ginger and lovely green eyes, and she has just been transported with her family from Terezín to Auschwitz. In short order, her father commits suicide, and her mother and younger brother are dispatched to the gas chambers, but fifteen-year-old Hanka Kauderzová is still alive. Faced with the choice of certain death in the camp or working in a German military brothel, she chooses a chance at life. Passing for an Aryan, Hanka spends her days in the brothel cold, hungry, fearful, and ashamed. She is sustained only by her loathing of the men who visit her and by a fierce, indomitable will to live.

This devastatingly beautiful novel explores and delineates the impossible choices one sometimes has to make in life, when the fabric of the world is rent asunder. Soaring beyond the nightmare, it leaves the reader with a transcendent sense of hope.

Editorial Reviews

Kirkus Reviews

The latest (2000) novel from the Czech author of more than a dozen fictional treatments of the Holocaust and its aftershocks tells the grim story of 15-year-old Hanka Kaudersova, who survives Auschwitz by serving as a prostitute for its Nazi masters. The intense narrative focuses as well on both a thoughtful German officer who lectures Hanka about the "beauty" of slaughter and on an impotent sadomasochist who's Hitlerism incarnate, then follows Hanka through war's end, repentance for her "sins," and salvation via marriage. Lustig's penchants for abstract and flat statement dilute his story's force. But Lovely Green Eyes does rein in a lot of the hyperbole that marred much of his earlier fiction; as a result, this is one of this very uneven writer's better efforts.

From the Publisher

“A moving act of absolution . . . . This strong novel about a girl who is debased but never destroyed pushes the reader to a new level of understanding of the things people do—and the things that are done to them.”—Washington Post Book World

“Absolutely incendiary reading, frightening and compelling in its authority . . .
appeals by its feather-light touch.” —Review of Contemporary Fiction

“Lovely Green Eyes could be described in the words of Mr. Kertesz’s Nobel citation, which praised ‘writing that upholds the fragile experience of the individual against the barbaric arbitrariness of history.’. . . A work of extraordinary delicacy.”—Washington Times

“A moving act of absolution . . . . This strong novel about a girl who is debased but never destroyed pushes the reader to a new level of understanding of the things people do—and the things that are done to them.”—Washington Post Book World

“Absolutely incendiary reading, frightening and compelling in its authority . . .
appeals by its feather-light touch.” —Review of Contemporary Fiction

“Lovely Green Eyes could be described in the words of Mr. Kertesz’s Nobel citation, which praised ‘writing that upholds the fragile experience of the individual against the barbaric arbitrariness of history.’. . . A work of extraordinary delicacy.”—Washington Times

Product Details

BN ID:	2940169936667
Publisher:	Brilliance Audio
Publication date:	07/04/2017
Edition description:	Unabridged

Videos