Books like The Clothes On Their Backs

"If you try, if you have a profound willingness to let yourself go completely you can enter the mind of another person. It takes a certain habit of thought, honed by many years of reading in the way I read, that immersion in books, so that they are not so much inside your head; rather, as if they are a dream, you are inside them."That is how I felt reading this book. I entered the mind of not just the narrator, Vivian, but of all the characters. Ervin and Berta, her parents, who escaped from Hungary to London in 1938, and spent the rest of their lives trying to hide from the world. Uncle Sandor, the pimp/slumlord/evil man/good man, who stayed behind in Hungary with his parents and became a slave laborer for the Germans, finally making it to London in 1956. Eunice, Sandor's lover, a black woman who we met on page one, admired all along, and said good-bye to on the last page. And Claude, a young man not good enough for Vivian, who became her lover for a short while.I entered the stories of all these characters through the bits and pieces that Vivian shared. There is a world of stories and living glimpsed through her eyes, and the people she meets while trying to escape from the narrow world and expectations of her parents. She wants to LIVE, and this book tells of her search for her past, and also her future.Some other quotes I particularly liked:"Human nature is not necessarily a pretty sight, close up.""Their is no anesthesia in the pages of a novel.""You know, my life turned out more banal than I ever expected, for as I found out, to live IS banal."This is a book that I was not aware of, by an author I had never heard of, until I saw the 4 stars given it by a GR friend, Cynthia. Our opinions on books and types of books we like are very similar, so I thought, I should look for this one. What a wonderful discovery! Thank you Cynthia, I owe you one.A note on the brilliant title, it has many different layers of meaning, just like the book itself.