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Chasing the King of Hearts
	by Hanna Krall
	translated by Philip Boehm
	Peirene Press
	4 stars
	Kapka Kassabova
A fortune-telling friend lays out cards for Izolda. They show the king of hearts (her husband), the six of hearts (a trip), and the three of spades (news). See, what are you worried about? asks the friend.
Like all questions in this novel - "Does this bag look Jewish?" - it has no sane answer, because this is Nazi-occupied Poland and insanity reigns. What Izolda is worried about is that her husband, Shayek, might have died in the concentration camp where he is incarcerated, which would end her mission to save him and to stay alive.
One of Hanna Krall's many ways of saying the unspeakable is to give us playful pauses along the way, and to punctuate the story with "armchair"' sketches in which Izolda looks back from the future.
By serving us exquisite morsels, Krall ensures we don't choke on the brutality of Izolda's new world.
We may puzzle over Izolda's adoration of Shayek (who becomes a fully fledged character only in the aftermath), but Chasing the King of Hearts is not only a love story and a Holocaust novel. Its deep and intimate inquiry is the mystery of personality - it is spiritual survival in a faithless universe.
The urgent question we are left with is this: how is Izolda able to remain herself across all the days and years of dying? Because, as she reflects in one of her many resourceful disguises, this time as Schwester Maria in a German hospital where she nurses a maimed SS officer, it is dying, not death that makes you mature.
It is about how "happiness can suddenly overcome a person in absurd situations", as the "armchair Izolda" tries to explain to her Israeli granddaughters; and how, at the end of the war, in yet another absurd moment of stress, she is able to think: "It would be silly to lose my mind now."
Quirky and powerful treatments of the Holocaust exist in film and literature, but Krall's joyous and wise Izolda gets under your skin in ways both subversive and uplifting.
Guardian News & Media


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LIFE

Book review: Chasing the King of Hearts, by Hanna Krall

Chasing the King of Hearts

Lifestyle

Culture

Books

A fortune-telling friend lays out cards for Izolda. They show the king of hearts (her husband), the six of hearts (a trip), and the three of spades (news). See, what are you worried about? asks the friend.
