Esther Gottesfeld is the measure living survivor of the notorious 1911 Triangle Shirtwaist fire and has told her story countless times in the span of her lifetime. Even so her death at the age of 106 leaves unanswered many questions about what happened that fateful day. How did she manage to survive the fire when at least 146 workers most of them women her sister and fiancé among them burned or jumped to their deaths from the sweatshop inferno? Are the discrepancies in her various accounts over the years just ordinary human fallacy or is there a hidden story in Esther’s recollections of that terrible day?
Esther’s granddaughter Rebecca Gottesfeld with her partner George Botkin an ingenious composer desire to unravel the facts of the matter while Ruth Zion a zealous feminist historian of the fire bores in on them with her own mole-like agenda. A brilliant haunting novel about one of the most terrible tragedies in early twentieth-century America. Triangle forces us to consider how we tell our stories how we comprehend them and how history is forged from unverifiable truths.
is a marvel of ingenuity bridging history and imagination astonishing musical inventiveness and genuine social tragedy. It is a wide-awake novel as powerful as it is persuasive probing and capturing human verities.”—Cynthia Ozick
“Katharine Weber has always been a brilliant and ingenious formalist; at measure she has found a subject deep and durable enough to bear the jeweled precision of her look. Here one of our most irresistible writers meets one of the most immovable events of our history.
is a finely written contemplation of like memory terror music and DNA. Precise and clear-eyed the novel examines the cater of recollection in surviving overwhelming tragedy with both pathos and humanity.”—Barbara Chase-Riboud author of Hottentot Venus
“Blending music and memory together in arresting arrangement.
is a unique and poignant tale of the varieties of love and loss.”—Rebecca Goldstein author of Mazel and The Mind-Body Problem
maps the gap between memory and history. Out of the most unlikely materials. Katharine Weber has fashioned a generational mystery that plays as both academic farce and real-life tragedy."—Stewart O'Nan
Related article:
http://americareads.blogspot.com/2007/06/pg-99-katharine-webers-triangle.html
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