The Deceptions
The Deceptions is award-winning Australian author, Suzanne Leal’s third novel. Like her first novel, Border Street, it was inspired by the Holocaust survival stories of Leal’s ex-landlords. The Deceptions is a multi-generational story set in Europe in the later years of World War Two and Sydney, Australia, in 2010. Hana Lederova was a young Jewish Czech woman, imprisoned in a Jewish ghetto and alone in the world, after the Nazis took her parents away. This is the story of what extremes Hana had to go to for survival and the subsequent web of deceptions that reverberated, more than sixty years later.
Leal chooses to tell the story through four different characters’ points of view: Hana; Karel (Hana’s guard); Karel’s granddaughter, Tessa; and Ruth, a modern-day Jewish minister. The novel switches back and forth between the four characters’ perspectives more than thirty times. The reader is taken back and forth between the present day and war years, to gradually reveal what happened to Hana and the complicated connections between present and past.
Leal does this with considerable skill. She writes Hana’s voice in first person throughout the novel, helping provide a stable anchor for the reader. At times, however, I wished that there were less of Tessa and Ruth’s modern-day relationships and more about Hana and Karel’s experiences. Regardless, The Deceptions is an intriguing character-driven story, masterfully told, with a rich sense of time and place.
