Steven Conte – The Zookeeper’s War (Rating: 3.5)
In Berlin, who can you trust? A story of passion and sacrifice in a city battered by war …It is 1943 and each night in a bomb shelter beneath the Berlin Zoo an Australian woman, Vera, shelters with her German husband, Axel, the zoo’s director. Together, they struggle to look after the animals through the air raids and food shortages. When the zoo’s staff is drafted into the army, forced labourers are sent in as replacements. At first, Vera finds the idea abhorrent, but gradually she realises that the new workers are the zoo’s only hope, and forms an unlikely bond with one of them. This is a city where a foreign accent is a constant source of suspicion, where busybodies report the names of neighbours’ dinner guests to the Gestapo. As tensions mount in the closing days of the war, nothing, and no one, it seems, can be trusted. The Zookeeper’s War is a powerful novel of a marriage, and of a city collapsing. It confronts not only the brutality of war but the possibility of heroism and delivers an ending that is both shocking and deeply moving.
Ath Book Club comments:
The war (WWII) is the catalyst and the zoo is an excuse for the people staying in Berlin, but the Ath Book Club agreed that The Zookeeper’s War really is about marriage and survival. It is about adaptation to very difficult circumstances by shutting down of emotions, ethics and morals when you really cannot make your own choices. Conte’s writing style is understated and that matched the bleakness of the story. However he constantly surprises with gems of phrases, such as “The skin had a memory” and “Unacknowledged a kiss might starve.”
The Ath Book Club praised Conti for his first book. The time sequence was sometimes confusing. The last 80 pages were well written, although some members wanted the book to end before the Russians came to Berlin. – Ten Ath Book Club members were in the meeting and the discussion went non-stop. Everybody had an opinion – that makes The Zookeeper’s War a great bookclub book.
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