Waiting for Eden by Elliot Ackerman – 192 pages
Book Blurb:
Eden Malcom lies in a bed, unable to move or to speak, imprisoned in his own mind. His wife Mary spends every day on the sofa in his hospital room. He has never even met their young daughter. And he will never again see the friend and fellow soldier who didn’t make it back home–and who narrates the novel. But on Christmas, the one day Mary is not at his bedside, Eden’s re-ordered consciousness comes flickering alive. As he begins to find a way to communicate, some troubling truths about his marriage–and about his life before he went to war–come to the surface. Is Eden the same man he once was: a husband, a friend, a father-to-be? What makes a life worth living?
My Review: 4 stars
Waiting for Eden was one of the most unusual and intriguing storylines I’ve ever read. Eden is a man, soldier, husband and father who is hospitalized as a living casualty of war. He is a man held captive in his own mind. The narrator is his best friend, a ghost who died in the same explosion.
In just under 200 pages, Ackerman creates the most vivid pictures of war, the family in wait, the loneliness of the soldiers, the marriages that suffer, the children that don’t know their parent, infidelities and friendship. So many emotions and feelings were elicited while reading this book. And the title, which at first confused me because I was certain Eden would be a woman, is really the continuing theme throughout the book. We live our lives waiting, and in this case, we see characters waiting for Eden to live and others waiting for him to die.
This is a reader’s read. It’s different, subtle, emotive and powerful.
Quotes I liked:
To Eden and Mary, home seemed like a quiet type of terrorism…”
“For both of them, home was a place long defined not by who lived there, but by who’d left…”
“That is something, he thought, to know what only the dead know. And what is that? All they know is they were once alive, and are dead only because of it.”
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