The Library Annex

That was Ira Claffey’s name in original Hebrew. Ira: a watcher.
He stood watching.
Or was he engaged in mere observation, evaluation, estimation? You could watch an occurence, a happening – you were said to be watching when events moved before your eyes.This place, however ruined and despoiled, was become static. Silence smoked up from the offended earch and struck your ears with force. Birds refused to visit here. They were occupied with family cares, with feeding in woods past the fence…Andersonville.

This pulitzer-prize winning novel about a Confederate POW camp and the surrounding Georgian landscape showcases monumental and unrestrained human depravity through which decency struggles to navigate; like a black sky dotted by a single, bright star. One must remind themselves that when looking at that night sky we naturally focus on that star and not the surrounding blackness.

However, I did find this to be quite the arduous read. In the beginning, just before the Confederate government began construction of the Union prison, I enjoyed reading about Ira Claffey and his family; his integrity regarding people regardless of their label and his love for the land. In the end, after the war, I enjoyed the plain concerns expressed by Claffey, the shift in livelihood of the Tebbs family and the realism of “legal slaves” transformed into “ecomonic slaves”.

But Kantor packs the middle with multiple minor characters and their experiences within the prison camp; like a collection of short stories. I wanted a plot to follow rather than a brilliant – and sometimes poetic – depiction of camp life. While I respect the gruesome portrayal, I yearned for more connection between the characters who sometimes seemd clouded by clever language and composition.

From a literary perspective, I respect Kantor’s choices. His world of war and slavery consists of the prison camp as a hell on earth, the Claffey farm as a tainted heaven for decency, and the Tebbs’ poor homestead as a squalid earth in between. No one place is fully moral or immoral. Kantor simply observes a grotesque imbalance towards hell within the balance of the three. But the act of balance transcends morality and our efforts cannot stop its natural inertia. The pendulum will surely swing back towards morality, and then back again towards immorality. But the pendulum never stops. All we can do is observe and endure.