The Enchanted and Unbroken

So the first book I read for 2015 … drumroll please … was “The Enchanted” by Rene Denfeld, which came out in March 2014. It left quite an impression on me and would’ve been my pick for best novel of 2014 if I had read it just a few weeks back. It’s very dark and brutal in some places but beautifully written and very well done.

How to explain it? The novel takes place at an old stone prison where some of the inmates wait on death row. There’s a warden, a priest, and a lady investigator who visits trying to discover buried information about her clients’ pasts to save the soon-to-be executed. One part of the story is about her life and a case she is working on to save a prisoner named York. He doesn’t want to be saved though, but she pursues it, revealing some ugly truths about his past (and her own) while investigating in his hometown.

The other part of the story is about what goes on at the prison as told through the eyes of a reclusive death row inmate. All the awful things you hear about in prison and among inmates manifests themselves in the story in brutal ways. To escape his situation, the inmate disappears in his books and re-imagines the prison as an enchanted place where fantastical creatures rome. He’s fearful, living in his cell with covers over his head, but he’s able to sense what others cannot.

“The Enchanted” is an unusual and unsparing story about life on death row. It’s not too political (there’s characters in it on both sides), it’s not sentimental (definitely not Disney), it’s not forcing something down your throat, but rather by the end it gets to something of what it is to be human — both the violent and the good. You sense the humanity of those involved.

I can’t say I really realized what this book would entail when I picked it up. It’s quite harsh, so be forewarned. It’s not a light, feel-good book. It’s about the exact opposite of my last read “The Storied Life of A.J. Fikry,” which I found too sentimental. This one is not anything like that. Normally I would not pick up a novel about a death row prison, but I’m very glad I did. Despite its darkness, I was taken by the beauty of the book — the author’s descriptions — and how well it is done — exploring such themes of the human condition. It pretty much blew me away.

Speaking of humanity, I did see the film “Unbroken” the other night, and while I did think the film was good in various respects, I’m sorry to say it didn’t fully capture the essence of Laura Hillenbrand’s book about Louis Zamperini’s incredible life story. Notably it misses quite a bit of the context of the history in her book, and what life was like for servicemen in the Pacific theater during WWII. It also misses Louis’s formative post-war years completely by just putting a postscript at the end of the film.

I liked the early parts of “Unbroken” best of Louie running, and the flying scenes of the WWII bomber plane. The scenes on the raft were also vivid and Jack O’Connell does quite a reputable job as Louis Zamperini. But the brutal scenes once Louie gets captured and sent to the Japanese POW camp take a toll. As my nephew said: the film felt like a long series of really bad stuff occurring to one person. And for me: who wants to watch a movie of two hours of torture? Without more historical context of the collective war experience, and Louie’s redemption later in life, the film misses out on being a lot more. I think Hillenbrand would stress that Louis Zamperini was just one among hundreds of thousands of Allied servicemen who sacrificed and was a hero during WWII. Through her book, we get to learn a little bit more about their service in the Pacific theater.

What about you — have you read (or plan to read) “The Enchanted” or have you seen (or plan to see) the film “Unbroken” — and what did you think?