Making it alone in war-torn Berlin

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THE PIECES FROM BERLIN

By Michael Pye

Knopf, $24, 325 pages

REVIEWED BY SARAH MEANS LOHMANN

Michael Pye's third novel "The Pieces from Berlin" sandblasts the overused topic of World War II terror and guilt into your consciousness and makes you think it is your own story, or at least that of your grandmother. Lucia Mller-Rossi is a sophisticated Italian woman living in Berlin during the war, whom Jews trust to store their violins or their jewels or their furniture when they are forced from their homes and sent on to concentration camps. She later escapes Berlin with the goods, and lives a lifetime of luxury, selling the valuables in an antique shop in Zurich. That much of her story is true. Her name and the rest of the details are fictional.

Mr. Pye's book is the kind that makes the reader wake up and see every splinter of light in a subway escalator, and invent stories about everyone riding down into the darkness of the underground. Not that his characters are conspiracy theorists. Lucia is a mystery, a sensual, intense, cold, calculating woman, whose moments of conscience and frailty, and helplessness bordering on goodwill leave the reader wondering if it is right to condemn her.

Her all too perfect husband bores her, but then leaves her with their young son when he is conscripted into the Swiss army. She decides to try to make it on her own in Berlin -- any way she can. Her need to find a means to raise her son Nicholas alone becomes her excuse to come home in strangers' long, dark cars at night, to spend teatime at the Wannsee as the Italian ambassador's mistress and to become friends with Henrich Himmler's staff.

She is with them, dining in the guilded Hotel Adlon when the bombers come, and she has, as usual, left Nicholas alone in the apartment. Nicholas can't move from the window, won't go down to the shelter.