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    The Madonnas of Leningrad: A Novel
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    The Madonnas of Leningrad: A Novel
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    The Madonnas of Leningrad: A Novel
    Ebook244 pages4 hours

    The Madonnas of Leningrad: A Novel

    By Debra Dean

    4/5

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    About this ebook

    “An extraordinary debut, a deeply lovely novel that evokes with uncommon deftness the terrible, heartbreaking beauty that is life in wartime. Like the glorious ghosts of the paintings in the Hermitage that lie at the heart of the story, Dean’s exquisite prose shimmers with a haunting glow, illuminating us to the notion that art itself is perhaps our most necessary nourishment. A superbly graceful novel.”  — Chang-Rae Lee, New York Times Bestselling author of Aloft and Native Speaker

    Bit by bit, the ravages of age are eroding Marina's grip on the everyday. An elderly Russian woman now living in America, she cannot hold on to fresh memories—the details of her grown children's lives, the approaching wedding of her grandchild—yet her distant past is miraculously preserved in her mind's eye.

    Vivid images of her youth in war-torn Leningrad arise unbidden, carrying her back to the terrible fall of 1941, when she was a tour guide at the Hermitage Museum and the German army's approach signaled the beginning of what would be a long, torturous siege on the city. As the people braved starvation, bitter cold, and a relentless German onslaught, Marina joined other staff members in removing the museum's priceless masterpieces for safekeeping, leaving the frames hanging empty on the walls to symbolize the artworks' eventual return. As the Luftwaffe's bombs pounded the proud, stricken city, Marina built a personal Hermitage in her mind—a refuge that would stay buried deep within her, until she needed it once more. . . .

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherHarperCollins
    Release dateOct 13, 2009
    ISBN9780061747182
    Author

    Debra Dean

    Debra Dean worked as an actor in New York theater for nearly a decade before opting for the life of a writer and teacher. She and her husband now live in Miami, where she teaches at the University at Miami. She is at work on her second novel.

    Read more from Debra Dean

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    Reviews for The Madonnas of Leningrad

    4/5

    85 ratings71 reviews

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    • 4/5
      I'll give The Madonnas of Leningrad a big thumbs up for its sad yet realistic depiction of The Siege of Leningrad and one of its survivors, Marina, an elderly woman, now suffering from another type of siege, an assault on her short term memory.Prior to the siege, Marina was a tour guide at The Hermitage. In preparation for an attack by the Germans she then assisted in the removal of the art work she had come to love and know so well, storing it in a safe haven. Marina was once an art student, then a tour guide at the The Hermitage in Leningrad but now, long after the horrors of The Siege, when her and her husband can enjoy life as empty nesters in Seattle and enjoy celebrations with their grandchildren, Marina begins to battle dementia. She can not recall her daughter, her husband must help her dress and cook for her but she does remember Leningrad. The suffering, the cold, the lack of food, the family and friends who did not survive and she remembers the paintings. She remembers the grand staircase, the statues, the murals on the ceiling but most of all, she remembers the Madonnas and the artists who painted them and the back stories involved with each painting.I have read a few books concerning Alzheimer's and a couple of books regarding the siege but nothing like this novel which takes an horrendous period of time and gives it back to a survivor to live over again in her waning days. Yet, the beauty of this story lies in the memories of Art and how in the most dire of days the remembrance of what is beautiful and the ability to imagine it all again seems to act as an armor from what is bad.Well written, mesmerizing and, of course, sad yet through the acts of people like Marina we are, once again, able to enjoy the Madonnas and so much more.
    • 4/5
      Read for book club. I suspect I am in the minority here, but I thought the present day chapters, where Marina is suffering from Alzheimers, were the strongest. The way Dmitri cared for her despite his frustrations, and Marina attempted to make sense of the people and situations around her, were very well done. The chapters set in Leningrad in 1941 (and the constant switching between the two got to be a bit much) were also powerful at times, but the artworks never really came alive for me (and there were pages devoted to them). The jump from 1941 to the present day with just a quick description of Marina and Dmitri's miraculous reunion in a refugee camp felt as if a whole chunk of the story was missing. The fact that Dmitri had to pretend to be a Ukrainian Pole was almost the most interesting fact in the novel for me - I wish there had been more on their adjustment to life in the US. Helen comments that she cannot reconcile the photograph of the mother from before the war with the woman who brought her up, and I sympathize.
    • 4/5
      As one can read from the summaries, this book is about a young woman's experiences during the Siege of Leningrad during WWII and her later descent into Alzheimer's. I found both stories to be compelling, but especially think the author did a good job of portraying Marina's confusion due to Alzheimers and the reaction of those around her at her granddaughter's wedding. It provided a great insight into the fact that we can never understand the past experiences of others especially our parents.I do believe this is a very well written novel; however, at times, I must admit that it didn't grip me as it should. I don't have a strong art background and quite frankly found some of the descriptions of the paintings tedious (I know those of you who are art lovers are going to disagree with that statement). This is a great novel for the lovers of historical fiction AND art.I would highly recommend The Siege: A Novel by Helen Dunmore which is also about the Siege of Leningrad.
    • 5/5
      A wonderful novel, simultaneously searing, heartbreaking and yet uplifting. The character development is excellent; they are multidimensional yet not overworked. The descriptions of the paintings as viewed from the main character's "palace of dreams" are overwhelmingly beautiful and compelling.
    • 4/5
      The Madonnas of Leningrad told the story of Marina as a young woman in Russia and as an old woman living in the United States. The young Marina worked at The Hermitage, a large art museum in Leningrad during World War II. The elder Marina suffered from Alzheimer’s, struggling with her memory. Both versions of Marina showed a woman deeply passionate about her contribution to preserving some of the greatest pieces of art in Europe.The story fluctuated between Leningrad and Marina’s home in Washington. The Leningrad parts of the story were fascinating – Marina and her co-workers hurriedly packed up the artwork throughout the Hermitage, saving it from German bombs. Not only did Marina pack away this valuable art, she made a “memory palace” so she would remember where to place the art once the war was over. The Hermitage was a large museum, so memorizing each placement was no small task.Once the Germans reached the city border, Marina and her family moved into the cellar of the Hermitage (along with 2,000 other Russians). Through this part of the story, you learned about the sparse conditions, scarcity of food and bitter cold that the Russians endured during the siege.When the story slipped to the elder Marina, you saw the ravaging effects of Alzheimer’s. Marina could not remember her children’s faces, how to dress or when to use the restroom. But her memory of her time at The Hermitage was perfect.Fans of historical fiction, especially about World War II, can learn a lot from The Madonnas of Leningrad. It’s also a clear look into the darkening mind of an Alzheimer’s patient. My only wish was that Debra Dean devoted more pages to Marina’s life in Leningrad. Her depictions of the siege and the museum’s art left me wishing for more. Nevertheless, this book was a beautiful tribute to the brave people who risked their lives to save something beautiful during the ugliness of war.
    • 4/5
      Debra Dean takes us on a journey in the mind of a woman who's living with rapidly deteriorating Alzheimer's. She can't remember the present, can't recognize her daughter anymore, and doesn't even realize how reliant she is on her husband now for everything. However, her memories of the past are so sharp and detailed, her present surroundings start to fade. As she fumbles her way around her daughter's visit and her granddaughter's wedding, her memories of the past introduce her to the person she was as a child in Russia, as a young woman who gets engaged the night before her boyfriend is sent to the front line to fight the Germans, a woman who, on her first visit to the Hermitage with her uncle, falls in love with art and later gets a job there giving tours, and who lived in an underground bunker during the war when the Germans started bombing her city. With an elderly woman who worked as a guard at the Hermitage, she builds a memory palace of the art she loved walking past, looking at. The descriptions of the art are so detailed they paint beautiful and amazing pictures in the reader's own mind. A young man who found her when she was lost said to a doctor who claimed she was rambling because she was in shock, "She was showing me the world."Beautiful. Sad, touching and beautiful.
    • 4/5
      This is the haunting tale of Marina, a woman who works and later lives in the Hermitage art museum in Leningrad during the long winter of the German siege in World War II. It switches back and forth between her suffering at the museum and her present day self in the Pacific Northwest as an elderly woman whose mind is failing her.Though I had never read about Russia during this time period, much less the siege of Leningrad, as I read I began to wonder if perhaps I'd heard too many stories from WWII. The hunger and death grew wearisome, with the only real interest of the story coming from Marina's passionate descriptions of the art in the Hermitage. But things improved, and I left this book happy I had read it. This is one of those books you wander through with only mild interest until the last few scenes, when everything picks up and ties together, and you turn the last page feeling uplifted and truly satisfied.
    • 4/5
      This is a very fondly written story about a woman who worked during WWII at the Ermitag in Leningrad (St Peterburg) and is suffering now from Alzheimer's as an old woman. The story switches between the memories of Leningrad and the decomposition nowadays. In Leningrad she had to wrap all kinds of art due to the war. Thereby she built a memory palace where she could recall every piece of it. Even during all stages of her Alzheimer's disease she was able to see all the art of the Ermitage vividely.Her husband and children try to comfort her during the stages of her disease even though they were rarely able to help her.I loved this story very much.
    • 5/5
      I learned of the siege of Leningrad some 35 years ago, when I first visited that city of wonders as a college student. I took it to heart 14 years later, when I returned with a group focused on spiritual connections. I have never been able to communicate to my fellow Americans the hope and sorrow that lodged in me as I walked among the endless mass graves of the siege’s victims, and tried to comprehend three years of entrapment in your home, purposefully cut off from food supply. Debra Dean has helped me tell and understand that story. She has couched it in the degenerating memory of a survivor, where it becomes the only thing Marina knows for sure, the deep past the only place she functions fully. Dean allows us to escape with Marina, from the material and familial comforts of age in America’s Pacific northwest in the 21st century, and the confusion and distress of dementia, into the bitter beauty of starvation in 1940s Russia, where Marina had duty and her heritage to feed her soul.Dean tells her stories with aching, lyrical beauty. Not all of the loose ends are tied up, not every story is finished. But we know what we need to know, and we understand that neat packages are among the victims of war. It is the beauty that kept Marina alive through the siege. It is the same beauty that gives her the strength to live on until the beauty of old is all that is left to her. It is the beauty, and Marina’s devotion to it, that draws us to her, moves us to celebrate her apparently unremarkable life. Marina, like the Madonna, whom the Russian Orthodox call the Theotokos, God-bearer, is the vessel of beauty and hope in the most profound devastation. She bears it to us through the siege of Leningrad, and perhaps most wonderfully through the siege of her fragile third life. Where Debra Dean learned that beauty I cannot guess, but I am grateful to her for giving us Marina.
    • 3/5
      Good premise but don't like chapters that segue back and forth though time. Also, ending was incomplete. Too many unanswered questions.
    • 4/5
      beautiful but so sad - entwined stories of decline into Alzheimers and the deprevations of the siege of Leningrad 1941-
    • 3/5
      At times this book was quite lovely (especially when focusing on the museum in Leningrad). Other times I felt it pushed too hard to be sensitive and meaningful and touching. Nicely told, with alternating chapters in past and present, but not quite the extraordinary experience I was expecting.
    • 5/5
      A beautifully constructed tale of an elderly woman with Alzheimer's who remembers her past much more clearly than her present. Marina is attending a family wedding but she rarely recognizes her own daughter, much less the young couple of honor. Marina's present slips easily into the past, when she was a young woman during the siege of Leningrad, removing famous works of art in the Hermitage Museum from their frames for storage and protection from the ravages of war. She endeavors to remember them all, especially various depictions of the Madonna, as a way of enduring the incredibly harsh conditions of living in the museum's cellar. Dean weaves past and present brilliantly. Though numerous descriptions of pieces of art that may be unfamiliar to the reader can grow tiresome, the author's spare and delicate language perfectly captures Marina's youthful determination as well as the toll of Alzheimer's. Highly recommended.
    • 5/5
      The Madonnas of Lennigrad by Debra Dean was a lovely story about a woman at the end of her life, suffering from Alzheimers, who re-lived the early days of her life the surreal world of war and hunger.
    • 4/5
      A real page turner. I had heard about the Siege of Leningrad during World War II, but this made it real for me.
    • 4/5
      Marina works at the Hermitage in Leningrad during World War II. Her fiancé Dmitri leaves to fight at the front in the war, while Marina is trapped in the Russian city during the Siege of Leningrad. She and her aunt and uncle must move into the Hermitage with dozens of others. They are all staving to death, trying only to survive. The secondary plot deals with Dmitri and Marina’s adult daughter Helen and her struggle with her parents’ declining health. Marina has Alzheimer’s and as she looses her recent memories, those long buried memories from the war come to the surface. The combination of the war story and modern day disconnect between children and their parents works well. Immigrants who survived horrific events during the war don’t often want to rehash their heartbreak, but their children may not understand how their current actions have been formed by their past experiences if they never share them. I felt like the book was a bit short. There are so many more details that could have been included. I loved learning about the real events that happened during the siege. It’s a fictional story, but the author did some excellent research. I had no idea about this whole part of WWII and I’m still curious about it. BOTTOM LINE: A short but powerful story of the Siege of Leningrad. Read it if you are interested in learning more about WWII in Russia. "Hunger has eaten away the veneer of civilization, and people are not themselves.""Over the years, they have grown together, their flesh and their thoughts twining so closely that he cannot imagine the person he might be apart from her." 
    • 4/5
      Reviewed this for Publishers' Weekly and really enjoyed it. The interplay between the present and the past is deft and meaningful, unlike what we see in some novels with a modern frame for a historical story. The historical plot is interesting and the emotional development in the present feels genuine.
    • 3/5
      Debra Dean had a wonderful idea for a novel, but the novel itself never lived up to my expectations for it. The setting, a museum in Leningrad during wartime, was new to me, and all the details - the food rationing, the artwork, the human misery during that time - were fascinating. Sadly though, the characters never felt as three-dimensional as the setting; the paintings felt more well rounded than the people walking among them. A beautiful title, a beautiful cover, and a beautiful idea for a novel---surely with just a little more editing, a little more work on the part of the author, an exceptional novel would have been published, rather than just this rather run-of-the-mill book.
    • 4/5
      The book starts off with part of a museum tour, and then quickly transports us to the story of an older woman, Marina, and her struggles with the advancement of Alzheimer's. We discover that Marina is the one giving the tour of the Hermitage in Leningrad that is interspersed throughout. As World War II rages, the museum employees, of which Marina is one, are packing up the artifacts to be shipped someplace safe. She is determined to remember the museum as it was, and begins to use the Hermitage as her memory palace. In the other storyline of the current day, Marina becomes more and more confused by daily life, and the past begins to blur into her present.I found the downward spiral of Alzheimer's affecting - in fact, the first descriptions of Marina's experience of life were heartbreaking. The World War II storyline was interesting as well, though I was a little lost when I didn't have my computer next to me to look up the artwork she was describing. That was one, but not the only, reason it was harder for me to get involved with the Hermitage sections.
    • 3/5
      I never really felt like this book grabbed. I loved the descriptions of the paintings and felt for the citizens of Leningrad as they struggled to survive the war. However, I never felt completely involved in Marina's story. I felt like something was missing.
    • 5/5
      Seldom do I read a page turner like this novel, so beautifully written and artfully constructed.Marina is a young Russian woman who is a guide in the Hermitage when WWII and the advancing Nazis threaten. She and her fellow workers must bundle all the hundreds of art-filled rooms’ objects into cases to be shipped out of the city for safe-keeping, leaving the museum bare to serve as a bomb shelter to the workers and their families.In chapters that alternate between that past and Marina’s American present, in which she is deteriorating from advanced Alzheimer’s, we experience the beauty of the Hermitage through Marina’s interior reminiscences as she builds a memory palace of the exhibition rooms and peoples the now empty walls and frames with the paintings – so many of them various Madonnas -- and furnishings that have been whisked away. The chapters segue into each other, merging past and present, like halves of a peach brought together to make a whole fruit.By the end of the novel, Marina’s daughter, Helen, tries to discover this unknown woman who birthed her but kept her own past private by sketching her repeatedly as Marina’s mental and physical wanderings off decline into the abyss of total loss and death.But in life, Marina preserved the world’s beauty unhoused from the museum, was able to “show” it to a group of young cadets, and to the last, as an old woman in the US, again “show” it to a young construction worker who discovers her asleep in the fireplace of the mansion he’s building. Marina takes his arm, points in all the directions of this palace he is constructing and says, "Look!” as if showing him the beauty in the world from within the suggestion of the future "memory palace" under construction. In a way, Marina becomes a Madonna who is but one of myriad works of art that we all are in the museum of the world. One of the most masterful novels I’ve had the pleasure to read this year – complete and satisfying, far-roving and domestic, a total examination of life, art, suffering, perseverance, and love.
    • 5/5
      This was a four-star book when I closed it's covers. In the two months I've since been pondering it, it's become a five-star book in my mind. Marina's story is told in the present. Her present in the Pacific Northwest, an elderly married woman attending her granddaughter's wedding; her present in Leningrad under The Siege. It is the merging and crashing of her two lives that make this story. As a young woman in Leningrad, she is working at The Hermitage Museum, among many who are frantically packing up the museum's treasures to be secreted away before anything happens to them. Most of the paintings are removed from their frames; the frames left hanging and the paintings packed among hundreds of thousands of the other holdings, on a train en route to somewhere safe. With that work done, their jobs are to take turns standing guard on the roof, and to try to remain alive, while slowly freezing and starving to death. There is nothing left now to distract them from the miseries of cold and hunger except their own internal resources. And so, as the world gets smaller and colder and dimmer, Marina notices, people are becoming fixated. Marina and Anya's fixation: Anya is helping Marina build a memory palace in the museum. “Someone must remember,” Anya says, “or it all disappears without a trace, and then they can say it never was.” So each morning, they get up early and the two women make their way slowly through the halls. They add a few more rooms each day, mentally restocking the Hermitage, painting by painting, statue by statue.Nikolsky's fixation: He sketches so incessantly that at the end of the day his fist will not unclench to release his pencil. The other night, he staged a showing of these drawings. … He had sketched interiors of the cellar and its residents, odd little drawings of their makeshift lodgings. Sketch after sketch showed the low vaulted ceilings crossed with pipes, the clutter of furniture, and the stark shadows cast by a single oil lamp. … One drawing showed merely a hand with three marble-sized pieces of bread resting in the palm. … “My intention was not to suggest anything but what is. These are not meant to be art. They are documentation, so that those who come later will know how we lived.”I found the history of the Hermitage during the siege to be a fascinating story, along with the glimpses of how people managed to survive during that time. Marina's present in her old age, suffering from Alzheimer's, gripped me as well. Whatever is eating her brain consumes only the fresher memories, the unripe moments. Her distant past is preserved, better than preserved. Moments that occurred in Leningrad sixty-some years ago reappear, vivid, plump, and perfumed. . . . The bond that had first brought them together as children existed whether they spoke of it or not, the bond of survivors. … She was his country and he hers. They were inseparable. Until now. She is leaving him, not all at once, which would be painful enough, but in a wrenching succession of separations. One moment she is here, and then she is gone again, and each journey takes her a little farther from his reach. He cannot follow her, and he wonders where she goes when she leaves.But it was the author's way of blending Marina's past and present, making them each the current thing in Marina's mind that kept haunting me. More distressing than the loss of words is the way that time contracts and fractures and drops her in unexpected places.Take, for instance, this selection: And looking around, one can see on the faces of the assembled family and guests the best of their humanity radiating a collective warmth around this fledgling young couple. There is music and tears and words. Commitment and love and cherish and community and honor.And music and more words. Olga Markhaeva recites poetry and Anya sings a song she remembers from her childhood, romantic and sweet. If Marina lives to be eighty, she things, she will never forget this wonderful night.The first two sentences are happening at her granddaughter's wedding, and the next three refer to something that happened sixty years ago in the bomb shelter in Leningrad. I think Ms. Dean did a masterful job of presenting a moment in history with a life unraveling mentally. I can just picture those thoughts of the disoriented happening something like that. More than picture it, I've begun to feel like that sometimes myself. Perhaps that's why this book spoke to me so strongly. Highly recommended for historical fiction buffs, especially if you know someone suffering from Alzheimer's.
    • 4/5
      I think I may have only given this book 3 stars if it hadn't been for the way this book tied into my memories of the Hermitage. I was in Russia a bit over a year ago now. I love Russia, and my month long trip was a dream come true. I spent a couple days in the Hermitage, and it was not nearly enough. I read this book not because of Russia, but because I am reading for the Mental Health Awareness Challenge, and this book was towards Alzheimer's. I wish I got more of the emotions and feelings about this women going through her disease, but what I got was lovely as well. I really love how the women can see the beauty in everything now---- dust floating in the air, the sun rays coming in. How many of us take the time to appreciate the beauty life has to offer?

      I think the author did a great job in portraying the main character slipping in and out of reality. I really enjoy (and I use this lightly because it's heart breaking) how she did a particular scene where the character feels like she is reliving her past and present at the same moment. The book in general is beautifully written. Her descriptions and word choice brings about a whole host of emotions throughout the novel.

      Despite this, the book feels disjointed and choppy, but this has to be taken with a grain of salt because it is supposed to be. The women is going deeper and deeper into her disease and so one moment she is with everyone and the next reliving her past with the siege of Leningrad.

      I'd like to know more about things in the story and incidents that took place; there's so much to the story that I'd like to continue. I feel like this could be my real life, begging my grandmother to tell me more stories and yet she simply does not or does not remember. I find it a huge shame, though understandable, that in this book the children know nothing of their parents' life during the war.

      Overall I think the book is good. I would've liked more though. But I still recommend this book--- especially if anyone has visited the Hermitage before. It's amazing how a few words the author write brings up clear memories of things I've seen in the museum. I am not a huge art fan, so I looked, but didn't study most of the paintings. I love the statues, and walls & ceilings, the Egyptian art, the armor, and I even clearly remember the paintings of the dead game---- I think I was particularly morbid back then. Everything I LOVED was of death, or the cut open game, or whatnot. I was drawn in by the portrayal of these things that were not beautiful but rather haunting or so ordinary that it took someone taking to time to portray it to make you see the beauty in it. Anyways, I'm rambling about things other than the book now. I do hope others read the book to experience these things as well.
    • 4/5
      The Madonnas of Leningrad. Debra Dean. 2007. This lovely, sad novel is the November selection for the Museum book club. Marina was a docent at the Hermitage Museum during the nightmarish German siege of Leningrad. She helped wrap the art works so they could be protected from the bombings as she watched her family slowly starve to death. At the urging of a older woman, she trained herself to remember the paintings in the museum and she would wander through the grand empty halls describing the paintings of the Old Masters, especially the Madonnas. After the war, she miraculously found her fiancé and they eventually found their way the United States and made a life there. We see Marina in Leningrad and today as she slowly falls in the confusion of Alzheimer’s, and the past and the present ooze together in her mind.
    • 5/5
      The Madonnas of Leningrad is a thin book, only 228 pages, but it leaves you feeling as though you traveled to a different time and place. In 1941, Marini was a tour guide at the Hermitage museum in Leningradbut the war has changed things and on Stalin's orders all the precious painting and sculptures are being packed up to send to safety. One day in despair Marini confides to a companion that she is forgetting all the beautiful paintings she has been so proud to present to the public. Her friend advises her to rebuild the art in her memory, a palace of paintings. Marini does just that and the descriptions of the art she is trying to remember, will haunt me.Shortly after her fiance, Dmitri, leaves for duty in the People's Army, the war goes badly for Russia and soon the unthinkable happens, Leningrad is being bombed, day and night. Marini and her companions speed up their packing and begin moving art to the basement to save it. Before long, she is a night spotter, standing on the roof of the Hermitage, watching for enemy planes and calling down to report them.The Siege of Leningrad lasted 900 days. With many of the houses unable to be occupied, Marini and the family she has left, retreat to the basement of the Hermitage, where they will live out most of the remainder of the war. Marini is cold, starved and in fear, but her palace of the Madonnas that graced the walls of the museum, give her something to rely on. More importantly, she discovers when she gives others 'tours' of these paintings, she describes them so vividly that other people 'see' them all. Marini survives the war and Dmitri does also, they meet again in a displacement camp and he arranges to get them out of Germany and to America at the war ends.Marini still walks the corridors of the Hermitage, glorying in the art that only she can see. Her life, after her children are grown becomes more and more her memories and finally, when her disease overcomes her, she only lives in the present, when someone, usually her husband draws her back. Her disease takes away the present, old age, illness, pain and leaves her and ultimately the reader with the memory of those glorious paintings, many of which have never been seen, in public again.
    • 4/5
      The book is about a woman, in the present who is suffering from Alzheimer's disease. Her short term memory is shot, but her long term memory, specifically relating to the time she was a docent at the Hermitage (and when she was sheltered there during The Siege of Leningrad,) is still sharp. The author does a great job of describing what someone with Alzheimer's might be going through and; the story has it's moments of triumph and poignancy. It's similar to WATER FOR ELEPHANTS (by Sara Gruen) and THE HOTEL ON THE CORNER OF BITTER AND SWEET (by Jaimie Ford) in that the narrative alternates between the protag in an earlier time and a "now" time when they are old; but TMOL has a little more dignity inherent to it in that it's not as obviously emotionally provocative. I spent quite a bit of time at The Hermitage Museum web-site, checking out the art and architecture mentioned in the book. The web-site is excellent, with high resolution digital images and virtual tours; but wow! how I would love to see the place and the art in person!
    • 5/5
      This is a beautiful book. How any citizens of Leningrad survived that winter is a miracle.
    • 5/5
      The grand, gilded frames hang empty on the walls of the Hermitage, a witness of hope for restoration of the paintings packed away for protection during the siege of Leningrad. Perhaps they are also a metaphor for the Marina's life - once filled with beauty and meaning, now under siege by a relentless enemy, Alzheimer's.The Madonnas of Leningrad shines like a jewel from its many facets - art history and appreciation, human drama and war, the mystery of the inner person and the heartbreak of Alzheimer's. I was captivated from the first page to the last sentence of this book about beauty, this beautiful book.
    • 3/5
      This book is a disorganized mess. It is a bunch of vignettes based on 2 themes searching for a plot. Some of the writing is beautiful regarding the art, and the environment, but the characters are paper thin. There are vignettes from the past about the main character's activities during WWII as a docent at the Hermitage Museum in Leningrad/St. Petersburg in Russia. Then there are vignettes set in a modern time with the character as an old woman with Alzheimers. The modern parts are rather bland and boring, in fact the whole book is bland and boring. The 2 parts never really connect up, nothing is explained or fleshed out.
    • 2/5
      I have a hard time understanding all the 4-star ratings. It was difficult to stick with this book to the end. Parts of it were boring, all the detailed art in the museum, etc. It skipped back and forth from present to past too many times. The story was poignant and sad, and the trauma the Leningrad population suffered was well described. It was not my favorite read that's for sure.