Letting Go

Letting Go

By Abe Aamidor
Unabridged
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“The narrator of Abe Aamidor’s new novel Letting Go, Dwight Bogdanovic, is deeply nostalgic in his recollections of the ’50s. But he is smart enough to know that being romantic about the past will just lead him in circles. At points in the novel, you wonder if Dwight will have the sense to move on with his life or else just get swallowed in the eddies of his past.

And this narrative tension, in part, is why the novel is so engaging. Letting Go is also a quick read because of the author’s keen observational skills, which he brings to bear—with both affection and dry humor—on the city of Indianapolis, which might be unfamiliar literary territory for most.

But this meditation on fathers and sons, on loss, and on the passage of time, should feel familiar to its readers because Dwight Bogdanovic is an authentic literary creation who reflects the struggles that we all have at some point in our lives.”

Dan Grossman, Arts Editor, NUVO Newsweekly (Indianapolis)

All deaths are hard to bear. But losing a son is the hardest.

Memory of war always loomed large for Dwight Bogdanovic. After all, his immigrant grandfather volunteered to fight in World War I and his working-class father joined up with the Canadian Army to fight the Nazis early in World War II. Yet it is only when Dwight’s soldier son, Bertrand, is killed under mysterious circumstances in Afghanistan that he really tries to understand why men fight and die.

Dwight Bogdanovic enjoyed a golden childhood in his idealized vision of 1950s America—freely riding his bicycle in the streets, pick-up ball games in the park, and earning pocket money by shoveling snow or raking leaves for neighbors—but coming of age proved difficult for him. After dropping out of college during the height of the Vietnam War and after receiving a medical deferment from the draft he travels the Midwest selling encyclopedias door-to-door to people who don’t want them, then returns to his hometown of Indianapolis. There he lands a series of temp jobs and hooks up with a hippie girlfriend before meeting the good woman who will become his wife. All seems right again until, one by one, all his beloveds succumb to their own fates—disease, old age, and war. Especially his son, especially war. Dwight struggles to overcome the loss of Bertrand and constantly replays letters from him in his head before realizing, with the help of yet another woman in his life, that the greatest challenge is not merely to survive, but to let go.

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  1. Albanypark
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    Honest, and elegantly written, narrative of a father's loss when his soldier son dies

    Most war novels either are anit-war books, or John Wayne-type, gung ho narratives. This is different. Very quietly written, not bombastic at all, but with feeling and precision, it tells the lifelong story of a working-class Indianapolis man whose grandfather and father served in the military and whose son, even though named for the pacifist Bertrand Russell, also served. The story is mostly the father's - what did he do in his life? what brave acts can he point to - and it's all brought home when his soldier son dies in mysterious circumstances in Afghanistan. There are clear "ripped from the headlines" war scenes here, though not much war or fighting at all, such as a riff on the Bowe Bergdahl desertion and the American sharpshooter who was killed when he returned home, basically more about the strangeness of war that about "action," and it's very different in that regard. One popular Goodreads-linked review site calls the book "gorgeously written." I can't disagree.

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