When the World Goes Quiet
“There was nothing the wind couldn’t do. It was alive and angry and eager,” recalls Evelien, when she’d heard it whilst sheltering from a storm in her parents’ farm’s root cellar in Belgium. Later, in 1918, the twenty-one-year-old hears it again during Allied bombardments. She lives with her in-laws in German-occupied Bruges while her husband is away at war. Having no news for over two years, she fears for him. Evelien, an aspiring artist, spends her days painting on walls of bombed-out buildings and continues to work in the mansion—occupied by a German officer—of her former employers, who’d fled the city. Asked to protect their valuables, they’d promised her a prized painting. A resistance fighter meets Evelien with an irresistible proposal: a letter from her husband in return for a secret German list kept in the mansion. However, while executing her clandestine undertaking, Evelien becomes enamored of a soldier, which could put her future life in turmoil.
Gian Sardar has penned this gripping historical novel with much realism, transporting us to WWI-era Belgium. As she writes in the acknowledgements, “I’ve chosen to explore my own family’s past,” that being her Belgian-American mother’s side. Her lyrical writing is somewhat Eastern in style, perhaps influenced by her Kurdish-American father. The storyline has all the interwoven elements of an epic: historical details, well-developed characters, a captivating love story, and a resounding ending. Most of all, the novel examines human survival, love, and loyalty in a time of war in an occupied area with a shortage of resources and denial of services by the oppressors. The plight of the innocent civilians impacted by aerial bombings is well narrated. The inclusion of art, paintings, and other artifacts adds appeal to the story and plot. Highly recommended.
