Solito

And exhale. Felt like I was holding my breath for 380 pages. How long can hope last? As long as it needs to. 
My natural impatience made this real life recounting almost unreadable but it's certainly makes it easy to emapthize with an experience so far outside my own. Though as a purposefully childless person in their late 30s, relating to the perspective of a nine year old was a tricky adjustment. Full credit to the author writing this memoir, who so viscerally cast his mind back more than 20 years ago, to breathe life into the pages about a turbulent time in his life. 
All the familial angst, but especially affecting to me was a brief window of time where a boy and his grandfather really related to each other for the first time, where grandfather filled the role of grandfather rather than just being scary.
Such a contrast between tension of waiting, the banal misery of extended poor traveling conditions, then moments of beauty, of care, 
poetic descriptions of physical surroundings, nature, people, food, music, saving grace of a child's imagination in alleviating/distracting from the full weight of grueling circumstances. 
Aggravating and heartbreaking to see the different treatment received at different crossing attempts, specifically by white people.
Speaking of, for my fellow white readers, while you get a fair amount from context, you might want to have a translation site ready, as there's a large amount of dialogue not in English. 
An important read, to broaden my own awareness, a touching personal purpose for publication, as recounted at the end, by the author. 
I'll need some emotional recovery time, but I will be looking up his poetry.