Songs from the Other Side of the Wall [Kindle Edition]

17 year old Szandi's mum left her, at just a week old, to return to England the day the Berlin wall came down. So Szandi is brought up by her father on a Hungarian vineyard. She has grown up part of the internet generation, debating how to right the world's wrongs in chatrooms, planning on becoming a singer. She later decides to move into visual art and adopts a bohemian lifestyle with her sculptress lover Yang. When her father becomes ill she starts to reconsider her life, herself and her relationships ,and whether she should stay in the East or move to the West.

Szandi is an intense character, given to falling in love in an instant and believing her community of forum friends have the answers to all of life's problems. Frankly reading the book I was glad I didn't have any friends like her when I was younger as I think all of her questioning conversations about life and who she is would have made my brain explode. However there were parts of the book that I thought were wonderful, where I really felt I connected with her and could see the personal development and an increasing self-awareness. I got a sense of isolation and dependence on her online friends and so loved it when she opened her eyes to the wider world and realised that life offline was probably more important.

Unsurprisingly, for this sort of character, in places the language she uses and references she can be complicated. Combining this with jumps around in time that I, particularly at the start, had problems keeping track of meant that it wasn't the easiest of reads. However this could be addressed by changing the formatting, making a clearer break in the text , and as a positive I spotted few typos .

A lot of people, while their story may not be so dramatic, will be able to identify with that stage in your life where you really start to discover who you are and where you want to be, and there were definitely parts that resonated with me and made me take pause. It is a good book, although the style of the narrative wasn't entirely my taste.

"Who can see their life from every angle?" This is a question posed early in Dan Holloway's Songs From the Other Side of the Wall, and, like the tether of a balloon, it snakes through the hands of his protagonist, Sandrine as she puzzles over its shape and where it may lead her. There is no question that, at some point, it will slip her grasp, but it is Sandrine's journey from ignorance to understanding (and back again) that gives us the outline of this complex tale of identity, perception and art.

Sandrine is 18 and motherless, raised by her father on his vineyard in Hungary, absorbing the mutability of grapes and life as she contemplates university abroad and the memory of a brief exchange that, perhaps somewhat improbably, affected her so deeply the very fabric of her life is unraveled by it.

Growing up in post-Berlin Wall Hungary, Sandrine is surrounded by the ghosts of horrors past and politically and culturally aware youth, including musicians of which Sandrine is a sometime member, and one in particular named Michael, a European rock star with his own website (through which he and Sandrine meet). Her own blog, Songs From the Other Side of the Wall is something of an outlet to the world that she never quite participates in, choosing, instead to `wander around' or, in Michael's words: "Sometimes you don't want to be in the middle of things. Sometimes, when something's really important, it's best to watch it from the edges, from the spaces. Or even to watch other people than the thing itself."

The `thing itself' in this case, takes the shape of a woman named Claire, whom Sandrine has never actually met (yet has obsessively fallen for) and whose accidental death (caught on camera and posted on Youtube) that Sandrine witnesses forever alters how she perceives her life and the those around her. Seeming coincidences keep taking shape in Sandrine's life as she later meets Michael's father, whose own story - and perhaps knowledge of Claire - keeps her in literal suspense.

Comparisons to Haruki Murakami's Sputnik Sweetheart may come automatically to mind in the description of the mysterious Claire - a gifted, intelligent woman whom we only meet through her letters to Sandrine and through pages of her journal - she lived and worked in Oxford with Sandrine's long-missing mother and it was on a trip to Hungary with her that she first spies Sandrine through the younger girl's bedroom window. Though possibly infatuated with Sandrine's mother, Claire's letters and journals indicate an immediate fascination for Sandrine that is also immediately and silently reciprocated. Do we see what we think we see? Sandrine will never know Claire and all the loose threads that surround their attraction give way to an almost obsessive desire for closure that Sandrine may never truly find.

Like Sputnik Sweetheart, Holloway's prose gives shape to his characters and delivers us to a time and place, from the end of the Cold War in east Europe to the dead-end enclosures of modern Oxford, the world inside and out, the interior mechanisms and escapements that tick and tock, leading to the next hour or the next half-empty station. Songs, in a sense, reads like the inner life of 21st century bloggers and artists piecing together whatever has been left behind by the last generation.

Like K in Sputnik, Sandrine is searching for something frustratingly vague and all the clues left behind only bring her to a kind of self-knowledge, though not the kind she was seeking. Interconnectedness is another theme of Songs, so, unlike Sputnik, we are given a narrative resolve to Sandrine's journey, one that takes up the loose ends of these relationships - parent and child, lover and other and the wanting nature of love - and sets them adrift, free.

Songs from the Other Side of the Wall is a beautiful and haunting novel written by a true storyteller and master craftsman. There are so many fantastic elements to enjoy here--from the peeling back of Szandi's character, detailing her previous life and how it and her current life are seemingly coming to a head, to the deliberate and methodical pacing which adds even more depth and richness to the story--that it's hard to know where to start.

And you can tell Mr. Holloway has done his homework, has painstakingly done his research and entrenched himself with the characters and locales, because he vividly brings them to life. I'd hate to ruin the story for those who haven't read, but, in short, it's poignant and powerful, an artfully written book for the Chatroom Generation.

Songs is a purely astounding read by an author that we should all keep an eye on.

Bravo.