It’s 1968, the year following the Summer of Love. “There’s a whole generation with a new explanation.” Anna Rossi is one of them, a twenty-three-year-old woman from a middle-class family who describes her life as “a set of random chromosomes adrift in a meaningless life. Useless, weak, a creature of clashing impulses.”

 

Anna is also conflicted. She’s Jewish, though loath to reveal or accept it, the anti-Semitic incidences in her life leaving her feeling “isolated, insecure, and vulnerable.”

After college, her parents pay for a summer in Europe. She heads for the continent with a friend, but when her friend bails on her in Greece, Anna has a decision to make: head home or continue on by herself.

 

A young man suggests they hitchhike together and her decision is made. A few days later, when they’re offered a ride by Max, a charming, attractive German with obviously more means than her backpacking partner, she decides he would make a more suitable traveling companion. Besides, Max is heading to Yugoslavia, and the Balkans have always intrigued Anna.

 

Though affable and unthreatening, Max has an agenda other than playing guide to an American tourist. He reveals he’s a smuggler and that his contraband is the Mercedes he’s driving. Anna will make a good foil when dealing with suspicious border officials if she’s willing. Without hesitation, or consideration of the consequences, Anna agrees. Traveling with Max through Yugoslavia, she’s introduced to Spiro and a cabal of associates and soon finds herself seduced by the rich culture and passionate people of this chaotic region of Europe.

 

As she tries to reconcile her own identity and understand that of Spiro's, her lover, she becomes embroiled in the intrigue and violence spawned by ethnicity, politics, personal jealousy, and centuries of tortured history.

 

Despite the author Michele Levy, digging deep into the dark machinations of the land and its people, I was not able to understand why Anna was so interested, especially considering the anti-Semitic undertones and her anxiety about being Jewish. Characters in the novel are well-drawn through dialogue and action. In the case of the protagonist, it isn’t flattering. The reader comes to know a young woman who lacks initiative and is passive, impressionable, irresponsible, and incredibly naïve for her age. Living in the countryside with Spiro, Anna readily takes on the subservient role of his peasant wife doing domestic chores and gardening, but I got the impression once she tired of it, which she no doubt would, she’d simply buy a ticket and fly back to her privileged life in America. Unfortunately, events overtake her before boredom does.

 

Anna’s Dance: A Balkan Odyssey is an ambitious undertaking. It’s part tragic love story, part history lesson, and part travelogue with well-written descriptive passages evoking a simple people living in rustic villages amidst brooding mountains. Rich with drama and passion, it’s a poignant story of love and misadventure, the clash of culture and attitudes, and how, as much as we’d like to think otherwise, we’re all captives of our personal and collective history.

 

- Review for City Book Review

This review was originally published at StoryCircleBookReviews:
http://www.storycirclebookreviews.org/reviews/mostofme.shtml

Sometimes, laughter is the only way to deflect despair. Robyn Michelle Levy knows it from personal experience. Her memoir Most of Me is simultaneously amusing and poignant. From the first word, the story pulled me in and never let go, and the pages practically turned themselves. But it was a harrowing read, too, because of the subject matter: a serious, life-altering illness. Or rather two of them at once.
With poise, candor, and self-deprecating humor, Levy writes about her medical plight. At the age of 43, she was diagnosed with early onset Parkinson’s. Eight months later, while still reconciling her debilitating affliction, she added breast cancer to her list of maladies. So far, she has won both battles.
Her memoir covers several years before and after her diagnoses. The book starts with ‘before,’ when the author struggled with her deteriorating health and bouts of depression without knowing why. Her immediate family—husband and teenage daughter—were often on the receiving end of her black moods, and afterwards, she was swamped by remorse. Then the bomb of Parkinson’s exploded in her face.
Throughout the book, Levy is relentlessly honest, as she chronicles her seething cauldron of emotions: anger and guilt, shame and acceptance, terror of impending diapers and determination to survive. She also details the support and affection she received from her friends and family during her arduous medical journey. In a way, the book is a tribute to her loved ones, although the writing never slides towards melodrama. Funny asides and droll observations keep the narrative balanced on a tasteful line between mushy and tragic.
One of the grimmest problems the author faced after each of her two diagnoses was how to tell her thirteen-year-old daughter. The situation was exacerbated by the fact that Levy’s father was diagnosed with Parkinson’s a couple years before. She writes: “We’re in the same sinking boat now: daughters coping with parents who have Parkinson’s. Under these circumstances, how can anything be OK? How can we get through this together, when I’m falling apart?”
Tears sprang to my eyes when I read those and similar lines. But more often than not, a morbid joke was only one step behind. Laughter and gentle self-mockery permeate the book. No dysfunction of the writer’s ailing body is off-limits to her irreverent keyboard, even when breast cancer piles on top of Parkinson’s. In her bleakest moments, humor sparkles, as she describes her recovery after mastectomy; outlines her wrestling with the question: chemo or no chemo; or tells us about naming her prosthetic breast Dolores. “If I don’t laugh I would cry,” she writes.
The same applies to me, as a reader. If I didn’t smile so often while reading the book I would’ve cried too. Books about illnesses are always emotionally draining, and this one was no exception. I wanted to protect myself from the author’s pain, but even more I wanted to understand how she found the strength to deal with her “diverse disease portfolio.” I read the book, and grinned, and chuckled, and learned from Levy’s courage.
Definitely recommended to anyone.

This is a hate it or love it kinda novel. I didn't hate it but I wish I hadn't read it. It's the type of novel that appeals by it's incisive and cutting way of portraying life in small community where everyone knows everyone and where you are a stranger forever if you aren't born there, even if you've lived there for more than half your life. You are forever brand "the stranger", "the outsider". It's also about small town politics, done in the most despicable way. And done by a woman to another woman. The bookshop is just a prop to the author as is Nabokov's book Lolita. There is no "affaire Lolita" just one snobbish, well do to woman who wants things her way and another woman trying her best to survive but ultimately falling. It's a sad little story that left me with a sour taste in my mouth.