Mathilda Savitch

by Victor Lodato

Book Overview

A fiercely funny and touching debut novel about a young girl trying to find out the truth behind her sister's death I have a sister who died. Did I tell you this already? I did but you don't remember, you didn't understand the code . . . She died a year ago, but in my mind sometimes it's five minutes. In the morning sometimes it hasn't even happened yet. For a second I'm confused, but then it all comes back. It happens again. Fear doesn't come naturally...

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0374204004
• ISBN13: 9780374204006
• Release Date: September 2009
• Publisher: Farrar Straus Giroux
• Length: 292 Pages
• Weight: 1.00 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.0" x 6.0" x 8.5"

Customer Reviews

A Bad-Ass book and a wonderful debut novel! Deeply moving and wonderfully written!

Mathilda Savitch weaves a moving story about grief, loss, and human experiences! I give it a full five stars! Stupendous!

Beautifully written and deeply moving

Mathilda Savitch: A Novel is a deeply moving, very sad story of a brilliant but disturbed young girl grappling alone with untold grief following great tragedy in her family. The voice of the narrative is youthful and often quite funny yet there is a depth and complexity which is very stirring and thought provoking. Mathilda Savitch is highly intelligent and wise beyond her years. Her parents are academicians and free thinkers. Both Mathilda and her sister have inherited their parents' fine intellects. At twelve she is insightful, pragmatic and bold. She is at that delicate age in adolescence where she has become a menstruating woman but she is still really a child ~ vulnerable, needy and sad. Her beloved sixteen year old sister Helene, the beautiful, altruistic light of her parents' lives, has died horrifically under a moving train. Although Mathilda maintains a humor which is sharp and quick, it is merely a veneer covering the great pain she endures from not only losing her sister but her parents as well. After recalling an episode which "was pretty much a perfect day" in her life, a day she remembers her mother and sister riding on horseback side by side, "The two of them could have been sisters and I could have been the mother I was so proud of them", Mathilda realizes "This is the sort of thing we should be sitting around the table talking about. Telling stories about Helene, the best days we can remember. It's supposedly one of the ways normal people grieve." Mathilda realizes her family is not grieving normally. Her mother has closed herself off and retreated into serious alcoholism and total despondency. Without his adored wife as she once was, her father is lost and helpless. "Instead I have to wake up one year after my sister ended and I have to put on her dress and march into the living room like a ghost. And even if it's awful it's the only way." Matilda feels she must resort to "awful" behavior in order to get through to her parents. Unfortunately her behavior only seems to drive the wedge deeper between them. But more true and heart-breakingly so, Mathilda feels that she really is awful. She nicknames herself Lufwa, awful spelled backwards. There are questions about her sister's death and feelings of guilt which she locks deep within. Her preoccupation with the basement of her home is, I believe, symbolic of her subconscious where these perplexing issues hide. The basement is not only a place to hide but a safe haven from the troubled, terrorized world around her, a place to preserve her vulnerable sense of self. Not only is Mathilda trying to come to her own terms with her sister's mysterious death but she has become absorbed in the national tragedies that are happening simultaneously. On the first year anniversary of Helene's death, the 9/11 terror occurs. While sitting in some classes where some of the teachers read off long lists of those who perished in the terror attacks, Mathilda wonders why "These dead p

An amazing spaceship of a novel

5.0 out of 5 stars An amazing spaceship of a novel, November 28, 2009 By Wanda B. Red (Boston, MA) - See all my reviews Victor Lodato has done something nearly perfect in this book -- in his amazing narrator, Mathilda Savitch, caught in that moment of transition between the blessed heedlessness of childhood and the complexity of adult knowledge, a moment like the one in which Eve eats the apple. Mathilda's voice toggles between simple but penetrating descriptions of fabulous imaginative universes and a strangely touching jumbled matter-of-factness borrowed from common proverbial wisdom. The balance brilliantly captures the imaginative child who yearns to be accepted in a world she can't decide if she wants: "And besides," Mathilda writes, "now I know things about my body I didn't know back then. It's not the innocence of yesteryear, that's for sure" (4). Matihlda's coming of age happens under the pressure of a tragedy in her family, the death of her older sister Helene (whose story gradually unfolds as the novel progresses). Interwoven with the Savitch family's personal tragedy are the ragged threads of a post-911 Age of Terror as experienced by a young person unsure of whether she is one of the guilty or one of the innocent (it's not an easy question, we aren't sure either). Matihlda believes that, to save herself and her parents (Ma and Da, but especially Ma), she must do something "awful," must perform acts that will jar them into a fuller acknowledgment of what each one of them (and especially she) is denying. She breaks into her dead sister's email, she spends the night in a makeshift bombshelter with her friends, she torments the family with audiotapes of Helene singing. She briefly runs away from home as she tries on one identity after another as if they were her sister's yellow dress, a garment that she wears like a bride on HSSH day (the anniversary of Helene's death, a palindromic acronym for the sister's name that echoes the hush that surrounds her death). Both in tone and genre, Mathilda Savitch reminds me of J. D. Salinger's "Catcher in the Rye." Here is a narrator who really "bursts upon the scene"; her language is so real and affecting that I went back to the beginning of the book after I had finished it because I simply couldn't bear to leave her voice behind. I'll go out on a limb here. Compared to Catcher in the Rye, "Mathilda Savitch" is the better book, the more vivid, the more emotionally real, the truer to the human spirit, finally the more hopeful. As Mathilda herself writes, "The best stories are like that. They're like spaceships. They take you somewhere far away and you think, oh, what a weird place. But then you think, wait, maybe I've been here before. Maybe I was even born here" (238).

Courtesy of Teens Read Too

Mathilda Savitch believes that her sister, Helene, was murdered - pushed in front of a train by an insane man. The killer is still out there, and no one seems to be doing anything about it. Mathilda's parents seem oblivious to anything except their own pain. Her mother suffers from bouts of depression, finding solace at the bottom of a bottle. Her father tries to maintain a sense of normalcy, but Mathilda knows it is a façade. She decides to do some investigating of her own. She hacks Helene's email account only to find it empty. She discovers other clues, but they are few and far between. Did one of Helene's many boyfriends become jealous and kill her in a fit of passion? Was someone stalking her? None of the potential answers add up because Mathilda knows the truth - she has known all along. The problem is accepting that truth...... MATHILDA SAVITCH is Victor Lodato's debut novel. He has created quite an interesting character in Mathilda. She is inquisitive, intelligent, eccentric and, above all else, stubborn. She is the kind of person who doesn't back down. Mathilda questions everything and explores every topic, from religion to relationships to sex. If you enjoy novels that push boundaries, pick this one up. It will be interesting to see what Lodato comes up with for his next novel. I will be waiting.........somewhat patiently. Reviewed by: LadyJay

A page turner

From page 1, I was hooked on this book. It is a page turner, and the sort of book that you never want to finish; you just want it to go on forever. The writing style reminded me of `The Catcher in the Rye' J.D. Salinger -- the main difference being that the narrator is a teenage girl instead of a teenage boy, but in essence, the way the story is told is very similar, especially as both characters also have issues in regard to their mental health. There are also a couple of references in the book to `Anne Frank's Diary', and again there are similarities in the way this character views the world, and the way it is written is almost like a diary; a teenager documenting events from her life. So although not an entirely original writing style, I feel the author has drawn from very solid, tried and tested, popular works as an inspiration for the style of this book. The character of Mathilda Savitch is very realistic and the book deals well with how the death of a child affects a family, and in particular how the parents' grief can affect their other children. Mathilda is a teenager trying to come to terms with the loss of her sixteen year old sister, and in a typical teenage fashion, she has invented stories to make the death easier to deal with. There is also the element of the child trying to find out more about this sister, who since dying has become more of a mystery, shrouded with some type of immortal quality in the younger sister's mind. It's an entertaining read, and although it deals with some dark subject matter, the way it is seen through the eyes of a child makes it somehow easier to digest. The author deals well with the the naiveté of youth and touches upon some important social issues, including war, terrorism, racism, and suicide. At a deeper level it appears to be a study into how the world is moving quickly towards an age of intolerance and eventual destruction, and how it could be detrimental to future generations if the danger signs are not picked up in time.

You Might Treat People Differently (if you knew what was really in their heart)

So I skipped going to the gym to finish this book this morning. . .I read it all day yesterday too. "Mathilda Savitch" is funny and heart-breaking, sarcastic and beautiful, imaginative and realistic. Lodato tells the story of a girl who has lost her sister. Her sister's death has changed her family, and nothing remains of her childhood. She wants to be a grown up, she wants to be an alien, she wants to be dead, she wants to go back in time and start over. Mathilda's wry observations along with her desperate struggle to find out what really happened to her sister make this a fast, engrossing read. Even more, Lodato comments on the innocence of our world before 9/11 and the suffocating fears that follow citizens for years to come. A line that I loved: "Apparently they had a lot of hopes and dreams back in the old days. . . ," which is how I think of my childhood in the fifties. And the meditations on grief, such as "grief is an island. . .I wonder how large it is and how long it will take me to explore it.. ."--to me, this is what writing is about, illuminating all those feelings we have that somehow another person knows how to put into words. Beautiful, beautiful, beautiful, wonderful book.