Helpful Score: 1
From the first page to the last, I thoroughly enjoyed this book. I especially liked Solomon's quest for the perfect dying words and his conversations with the doctor and the person in his attic.
Helpful Score: 1
Solomon Kugel is a neurotic salesman who has just moved his family to a quiet farmhouse to escape the stress of city life. Kugel is consumed by thoughts of death and obsessed with finding the perfect "last words" to utter before death and the perfect epithet to put on his tombstone. But Kugel doesn't find rural life less stressful. One sleepless night, he investigates a strange sound and makes a discovery in his attic that will change his life forever. Often irreverent, sometimes laugh-out-loud funny and even sad in parts, "Hope: A Tragedy" is more about how we live our life than about how we prepare to die. Kugel just needs to figure that out.
I can't believe I read the whole thing! I usually quit reading a book I do not like but finished this one. Characters were not strong and I did not relate to where the story was going, which ended up being nowhere.
I wasn't sure how to take this book at first, then began to go with the flow and started to enjoy it. Incredibly sad, terribly funny. It boils down to being a story of the want to be free of our history that haunts us. How it gets there is another story. One that includes Anne Frank living as an old woman in the attic of Solomon Kugel, a Jew that wants to kick her out one day, and care for her the next. Kugel's private thoughts on the last words of the dying (of any creature, not just man) had me in stitches. I was hearing myself in those words.
I could not get into this book no matter how hoard I tried.
