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Deb D

Deb D

Amazon.com Author

has 10 followers and is following 7 people

Greetings to all fellow book readers,

At last, my first novel, Magician's Spell is available now from www.redrosepublishing.com or Amazon Kindle.

Please visit my website: www.magicians-spell.com or my blog http://debrasuedenson.blogspot.com for more information about the book.

As you can see from my bookshelf I LOVE... more »
  • Royal Oak, MI, USA
  • member since April 12, 2008

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Deb D’s last login was Sunday, May 1, 2011.

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Public Notes

  • Satis Shroff Lecturer,Writer,Poet

    Satis Shroff Lecturer,Writer,Poet says

    Hi Deb!
    Here's wishing you a Happy New Year.
    I think Shelfari's a good idea but they should also start a blogging-possibility for the participants so that you can write a review, then post it to friends out here. The way it is, you have to keep on posting reviews manually to all your friends. I like the FB version much better.
    I read a book recently and thought I'd share it with you:
    Creative Writing Critique (Satis Shroff): FIRE IN THE BLOOD
    Review: Irene Nemirovsky Fire in the Blood, Vintage Books, London 2008,
    153 pages, 7,99 Sterling Pounds (ISBN: 978-0-099-51609-5)

    Denise Epstein was 13 when her mother Irene Nemirovsky was deported to Auschwitz, where she eventually died in 1942. The daughter is now an octogenarian and was instrumental in helping her mother attain her place in the world literature. Irene Nemirovsky was a writer who could look into the souls of humans and make music with words. Her masterpiece Suite francaise was published in France in 2004 and was immediately awarded the Prix Renaudot.

    The characters of Fire in Blood are drawn from a rural French town in Burgundy, a wine-growing area where people are simple and stick together, want to retain their ‘peace’ and don’t like the police and the authorities. A place where all people show conformity and keep their mouths shut. Peace is a synonym for not wanting to be involved in the affairs of other people. The author’s attitude towards the characters has a universal appeal, for it could happen anywhere in the world in a closed-circuit society where outsiders are shunned and not generally accepted. Nemirovsky shows not only what people do to others but also what the passage of time does to us all. The characters aren’t flat and every character bounds into life and you an imagine the world that she creates in her 153 page novel still goes on with its own pace without much changes. The community itself shows a predatory behaviour of extreme cunning.

    The major theme of Fire in Blood is love, poverty, arranged marriages and extra-marital affairs that lead to complications and new story developments. The protagonist Sylvestre also called Silvio tells the story in the first person singular and recalls stories in front of the fireplace about his beautiful, graceful cousin Helene and her daughter Colette, Brigitte Delos and Francoise, their marriages, happiness and boredom and the seasonal changes of the Burgundy countryside. Silvio speaks about impatient young people and the perfectly balanced older people at peace with themselves and the world, despite the creeping fear of death. The book is replete with the truths, deaths, marriages, children, houses, mills, dowry, haves and have-nots, stinginess, love-affairs, hatred, deception and betrayal. Nemirovsky is an excellent story-teller and reveals her tale of flaws and cruelties of the human heart in an intricately woven story. She builds up suspense and you feel the catharsis when an innocent-looking protagonist tells her version of how a man was murdered.

    The theme is traditional and familiar and is psychologically and socially interesting in intent.

    Silvio tells about his childhood and about children asking their parents how they met, fell in love and married. He also mentions past loves, former grudges, inheritances, law suits and who-married-whom and why in the French provincial setting. The story plot is slow at the beginning but gathers momentum, and the climax is not the murder but how the author unfurls the story of the confession. In the end Silvio confides to the reader how much he still loves his dear cousin Helene, who’s married to Francoise.

    The intellectual qualities of writing of Nemirovsky are her cheerfulness, sudden twists and power of observation which flow into the story making it a delightful read. She gives you the impression that her tale is linear, only to show you that there’s a twist that takes narration in another direction. Silvio, the Ich-Erzähler, says to Colette, who wants to involve him in her family drama: ‘Tell them you have a lover and that he killed your husband.. What exactly did happen?’

    wit and humour and there’s rhythm in the tale.

    Nemirovsky employs the stylistic device of symbolism to characterise the farmers and their hypocritical nature, how they mob people they don’t prefer to have around them and how they indulge in backbiting. A stingy 60 year old farmer marries a lovely 20 year old woman and the gossips begin. Silvio remembers how Colette had once told him he resembled a faun: ‘an old faun, now, who has stopped chasing nymphs and who huddles near the fireplace.’

    This is the confession of a man who had once fire in blood, and a meditation on the various stages of life, the passing of time, in which youth and age are at odds. A recurring theme is the seed from which problems grow: ‘Imagine a field being saved and all the promise that’s contained in a grain of wheat, all the future harvests…well, it’s exactly the same in life.’

    Nemirovsky’s use of dialogue is very effective and takes the story forward.

    Her literary oeuvre ranges from an extraordinary collection of papers, Fire in the Blood, Suite francaise, David Golder, Le Bal, the Courilof Affair, All Our Worldly Goods.

    The Germany titles are: Die Hunde und die Wölfe, Feuer im Herbst, Herbstfliege, Leidenschaft, Die Familie Hardelot, Der Fall Kurilow and Irene Nemirovsky: Die Biographie.

    * * *

    Irene Nemirovsky: COLD BLOOD (Satis Shroff)
    Subtitle: Moaning in All Eternity

    Six decades ago,
    My life came to an end,
    In Auschwitz.
    I, Irene Nemirovsky, a writer
    Of Jewish-Russian descent,
    Died in Auschwitz.
    I live now in my books,
    In my daughter’s memories,
    Who’s already an octogenarian,
    Still full of love and fighting spirit:
    For she fights against
    The injustice of those gruesome days.

    I was thirty-nine,
    Had asthma,
    Died shortly after I landed in Auschwitz.
    I died of inflammation of my lungs,
    In the month of October.
    That very year the Nazis deported
    Michael Epstein, dear my husband,
    Who’d pleaded to have me,
    His wife, freed from the clutches
    Of the Gestapo.
    They also killed him.

    My daughters Denise 13,
    And Elizabeth 5,
    Were saved by friends
    Of the French Resistance,
    Tucked away in a cloister for nuns,
    Hidden in damp cellars.
    They had my suitcase with them,
    Where ever they hid,
    Guarding it like the Crown Jewels.
    To them it was not only a book,
    But my last words,
    That I’d penned in Issy-l’Eveque.

    I wanted to put together five manuscripts
    In one: Suite Francaise,
    That was my writer’s dream.
    I could put only
    ‘Storm in July’ and ‚Dolche’
    Together.
    I passed away early in August 1942.
    Too early.
    In my two books I’ve written
    About the flight of the Parisians
    From the victorious Germans,
    The awful situation in an occupied hamlet.
    Small people and collaborators,
    Who’d go to extremes
    To save their skins,
    Like ants in a destroyed ant-hill.

    It’s sixty years hence,
    But my work hasn’t lost its glow,
    Like the lava from an erupting volcano.
    You can feel its intensity,
    When an entire nation
    Was humiliated and had to capitulate,
    Losing its grace, dignity and life.

    I was born in Kiew,
    Fled to Paris via Finnland and Sweden,
    After the Russian Revolution.
    I was a maniac,
    When it came to reading,
    Had a French governess,
    Went often to the Cote d’ Azure and Biarritz.
    I studied literature in Sorbonne in 1919.
    Shortly thereafter,
    I began to write:
    About my Russian past,
    My wandering years.
    The colour of the literature I wrote
    Is blood from an old wound.
    From this wound I’ve drawn
    The maladies of the society,
    Human folley.

    I was influenced by writers,
    From Leo Tolstoi to Henrik Ibsen.
    An unhappy childhood,
    Is like when your soul has died,
    Without a funeral:
    Moaning in all eternity.
    ----------
    Have a nice week, dear Deb.

    posted 1 year ago. ( send a note )
  • Satis Shroff Lecturer,Writer,Poet

    Satis Shroff Lecturer,Writer,Poet says

    Hi Deb! Here are my Book Fair impressions from Frankfurt:
    Frankfurter Book Fair:

    Our brain is like a labyrinth with all those fissures and lobes, and memory was a big theme at the 62nd Book Fair in Frankfurt-upon-the-Main 2010. The memories of the writers and poets who haven’t forgotten the terrible upheavals in Argentina. The writers and the people who suffered under the repression, censorship and eventual escape from a country ruled by a brutal regime from 1976 to 1983 culminating in the debacle and trauma of the Falkland War in 1982 in which the Gurkhas of Nepal were also engaged in combat.

    Many of the 65 Argentinian writers who flew to Frankfurt during the Book Fair were themselves victims of the regime. Juan Gelman, the poet who spent years looking for his granddaughter. Felix Bruzzone and Laura Alcoba still miss their parents for they have disappeared. Repression is an eternal them for writers in their novels especially in the works of Martin Kohan, Guillermo Saccomano and Pablo de Santis.

    Most Argentinian writers have written about the tension in the field of literature and politics, violence, savagery and so-called civilisation , as seen in the literature of the 19th century and even today. The Argentinian writers tell us their stories of the wounds that they are still licking and which time hasn’t been able to heal. Chronic wounds in the souls of the people of Argentina, a nation of off-beat writers, who prefer to produce profound literature and not kitsch.

    Argentina, where Europeans migrated to en masse and where the indigenous people’s rights were brutally trampled and where these hapless people were criminally assimilated, a fact which still delivers social and political issues. A land that lived on cattle rearing and wool export and became dependent on foreign capital of the world market, where social and political reforms were interrupted by military dictators. What remained was modernisation that has failed. It resulted in a big chasm between the haves and have-nots, like in many societies throughout the world, and led to social imbalance and a late consolidation of the national state in the 19th century brought instability and new reforms that were enforced aggressively.

    Argentina is a country that has brought literati like Jorge Luis Borges and Julio Cortazar. Sousa, Che Guevara, Eva Peron and Madonna. A land which was one of the richest western states at the beginning of the 20th century. Only 100 years later followed the corralito, whereby bank accounts of the citizens were closed and the state went bankrupt. In recent years we’ve seen the cases of Iceland and Greece. Argentina is also a land where 30,000 people were arrested, tortured and murdered during the military dictatorship, and a hundred thousand people sought shelter and asylum as refugees in neighbouring countries.

    In Spain the book consumption is ten books per person per annum. In Argentina, which is the second largest Spanish language market, it is three books per person per year. In 2009 Argentina published 20,300 new titles and reached a total of 75 million copies sold. Argentina has an Act to promote books and reading, a law that provides subsidies to promote publishing and reading. Books are exempted from taxes, the shipping rates are reduced and there’s a network of 600 booksellers that help to support the market.

    Are Argentinian writer and poets pretentious? Yes indeed, this is due to writers like Borges, Bioy, Silvina Ocampo who write not to make a living but as artists who write literature of longstanding value, and not commercial writing in the Spanish-speaking world.

    However, it must be mentioned that Guillermo Martinez (and not Jorge Luis Borges, Julio Cortazar or even Juan Jose Saer) has sold more books in foreign countries. His novel ‘The Oxford Murders’ (Crimenes de Oxford) is written in an Agatha Christie manner, a whodunita’ which was long on the bestseller list.

    In the past three decades Buenos Aires has been the venue of the largest Book Fair in South America with an average of a million visitors each year. According to Fuentes, there’s nothing more Argentine in Borges than his necessity to fill the ‘blank book’ of both his country and the Latin American literature, which makes him one of the founders of the new prose in the region. At the sight of a herd of horses in Puente Alsins at dawn, Borges is said to have cried out: ‘Hot damn! That’s homeland.’ A passionate man and a lover of night.

    Author Cornelia Funke launched the Book Fair and said: ‘After my last novel ‘Ink Death,’ I was longing to write in a more lean and modern way’. Now she has written ‘Reckless’ in tandem with the film producer Lionel Wigram, who’s known for his movie versions of J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter stories.

    This year’s Book Fair cast a spotlight on storytelling in multifarious ways: in video games, on film and in digital and print books for, as we know, the contents of stories know no borders. What Gutenberg started as a printing revolution 500 years ago has gone digital and 3-D (starting with ‘Avatar’) today, which in itself is a revolution. In Germany most reading is still done from printed books. The e-books represent only 1 %. Kindle and Oyo hasn’t caught on as yet. In China and USA e-books are growing exponentially. This goes to show that digital is no longer the scary space it was many years back. To understand media you have to understand how it works. In the media cosmos the computers play the role of the sun, and digital has come to stay and is growing all the time.

    Do European authors have the same publishing rights? Far from it. In UK the duration of a contract can vary from 70 years after the death of the author. In Spain it’s 15 years. Economic rights and moral rights are separate in France. And in Germany? The rights are indivisible. In UK the book market was deregulated in 1995. The UK royalties for authors are greater but the market is tougher and books are discounted. If you want to n read it in French on: www.Leitmotif.fr.

    What do smart and savvy young people want from media? The Millinium Generation can surf on YouTube, download two-minute shots they prefer which is actually a short-attention-span entertainment, the ones we upload on FB. If the hook in the story you’re telling doesn’t work, the young people zap to another story. This is an age where parents are regarded as peers, who really don’t show the kids how to navigate the world. Do the young people understand the world? No, they don’t. They’re even scared of the world.

    The Frankfurter Buchmesse, like all fairs, can be a tiring experience and so I took time out and went to Beata, a Polish blonde who gave me a great massage (see pic). She and other physiotherapists were promoting an Austrian wellness shop. I even chanced to meet a publisher from Catmandu: Siddhartha Maharajan of Mandala Book Point) and a Nepali poet who was selling black and white photos & poems. I always make it a point to speak in as many languages as I can at the book-fair, and I must say it was as always a great experience chatting with so many interesting people from all over the world. Jonathan Franzen, Artur Becker and Günter Grass were together at the 3Sat stand in Hall 4.1 Q561.In was a case of: Glasses (Frenzen) meet Vodka (Becker) and Pipe (Grass).
    Have a nice time and take care.Congrats on your new book...
    Regards,
    Satis

    posted 1 year ago. ( send a note )
  • Satis Shroff Lecturer,Writer,Poet

    Satis Shroff Lecturer,Writer,Poet says

    On Meaningful Books..
    Hi Deb!
    Yes, you're right. Shelfari is an interesting place and you not only get to know what people are reading and talking about, but also actually communicating with people from the whole world. You must be a wonderful person. Keep on posting the books that mean something to you.
    I found Dale Carnegie excellent reading when I was growing up, and tried to internalise his lessons, wrote a diary about my interactions with people and I must say it really was astonishing to observe that you could improve your habits, your behaviour towards and enjoy talking with people. I had good relations with my Dad after reading DC's book 'How to Win Friends and Influence People.' I didn't change my Dad but myself, which was a revelation and a revolution in my life.
    Which book really helped you or has meant a lot to you in life? That would be interesting...
    Regards from the Schwarzwald,
    Satis

    posted 1 year ago. ( send a note )
  • Satis Shroff Lecturer,Writer,Poet

    Satis Shroff Lecturer,Writer,Poet says

    Hi Deb!
    Long time no news. But no news is mostly good news and means that the other person is engaged in creative activity, as you are. Been writing quite a lot in the past and when I don't have time to write a book, I write articles or poems.

    I too must confess that I haven't been visiting Shelfari friends for quite sometime. Hope they'll bear with me. In diesem Sinne,
    Ciao!
    Satis

    posted 2 years ago. ( send a note )
  • Robin636

    Robin636 says

    merde! Deb...the same thing happened with MY LIFE AS A CONCUBINE...i went to the miami bk fair in 10/07 and handed out a gazillion postcards w/ the cover and pertinent info...when i got home, there was an email, informing me that the pub. was outta biz! spoke to my editor and asked her to recommend another pub. she did...i sent them bk and they bought it! how about an e-bk pub...i've got names if ya need 'em...good luck...oh, and the panda is a pix from china, when 6 pairs of twins were born...i'm sure the name is in chinese characters which i definitely can't read...

    posted 3 years ago. ( send a note )
  • Robin636

    Robin636 says

    Hi Deb,
    congrats on the bk!!! just wanted to ask how you posted it on the self-promo discussion on the readers/writers group...i tried replying to your message and got nothing...
    thanks,

    posted 3 years ago. ( send a note )
  • Jodie R

    Jodie R says

    Hi Deb - I saw your post in the Self-Promotion discussion and had to stop by. I see you have John Irving on your shelf, so you must be a fascinating human being. You and I have something else (other than Mr. Irving) in common: I own my own business, too - Bookkeeping. Make sure to remind us all when your book comes out.

    posted 3 years ago. ( send a note )
  • Satis Shroff Lecturer,Writer,Poet

    Satis Shroff Lecturer,Writer,Poet says

    Hi Deb! Greetings from the Schwarzwald.You're right about the site.Great to be here.When I have time I'll surely pick up some books for the shelf.Congrats on your forthcoming book. Keep the creative juices flowing. Is the book about magic? Have a nice day.
    Regards,
    Satis

    posted 3 years ago. ( send a note )
  • Pat McDermott

    Pat McDermott says

    Thanks, Deb. I'm still figuring out how Shelfari works. So far I'm enjoying it. I took a peek at your web site. Your Magician sounds wonderful! I'm looking forward to having Shelfari shelves full of Tiger books!
    Best, Pat

    posted 3 years ago. ( send a note )

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