Teaser Tuesday: The Jade Cat

Teaser Tuesdays is a weekly bookish meme, hosted by MizB of Should Be Reading. Anyone can play along! Just do the following:

• Grab your current read
• Open to a random page
• Share two (2) “teaser” sentences from somewhere on that page
• BE CAREFUL NOT TO INCLUDE SPOILERS! (make sure that what you share doesn’t give too much away! You don’t want to ruin the book for others!)
• Share the title & author, too, so that other TT participants can add the book to their TBR Lists if they like your teasers!

My teaser this week is from The Jade Cat, by Suzanne Brøgger.

Here is a description of the book (I am about 150 pages in and it is really good so far!)

From Publisher’s Weekly–

Brøgger’s lively and insightful novel chronicles the fates of the Jewish Løvin family as they endure the tragicomic events of the 20th century and adhere to patriarch Max’s injunction: Thou shalt be a personality. Forging an identity, however, becomes complicated when the family is torn apart by war and forced to abandon its religious identity and nationality. Although the novel expands its breadth by including anecdotes about even the most minor players, the narrative’s emphasis is on three generations of women—strong-willed Katze; her daughter, Li, who comes of age during WWII; and Li’s eldest daughter Zeste. Hypocrisy, particularly with regard to gender-appropriate sexual conduct, is a major issue for all three, though each fares badly in the battle of the sexes. Attitudes toward Jewish identity—animosity, denial, ambivalence—also provide a common link among the stories. Brøgger offers readers a powerful, personal account of rapidly changing times through the lens of a family whose comedies, tragedies and absurdities are magnified by historical context and whose contemporary descendants provide a glimpse of a more hopeful future. (Sept.)

My teaser is a portion of a letter written by Tobias to his wife Katze.

You are a terribly dangerous woman when you send sweet loving words over the ether or in a letter.  Or when you, “à la woman”, aim your delightful blue searchlight at some poor man! You are hard to resist when you want something. And the worst of it is that you are always so convincing because you believe in it yourself for the moment. You are–to speak the language of today–a magnetic mine, so I can well understand how a man would run straight into it, even if it meant being blown to pieces.

-page 64