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sheenaghpugh
Ursula gasped involuntarily, imagining the stranger – desperate, violent. But then she remembered the dead man and how wretched he'd looked, the emaciated limbs brittle as tinder, not menacing at all, only sad and disgusting.
Not a lot of first novels, begun in the author's student days, get picked up by really big publishers like Bloomsbury, so this is some achievement. It's probably every young writer's dream, but those who want it to happen to them will need to come up with a real page-turner, and write it with unusual assurance and skill.
Müller has drawn on her own part-Austrian background for her story, which is hard to classify – it might be called a war story, though it is very much about the effect of war on civilians, or maybe a coming-of-age story. The protagonist, Ursula, is eight in the prologue and thirteen when the story proper begins, in 1944, which does not mean, as the unwary tend to assume, that it is a children's book; it contains some distinctly adult material. In the small community of Felddorf, ordinary people find themselves adapting to the curse of interesting times – a dictatorial regime in which anyone even slightly non-conformist is threatened, a war that brings privation, danger and the absence of loved ones, and finally the Russian occupation which notoriously turned into an orgy of rape.
In such times, people discover qualities in themselves, both good and bad, that might otherwise have gone unsuspected. The need to keep one's head down leads to acts of cowardice; the urge to protect one's friends to acts of great courage. Petty spites are paid off and altruistic risks taken. People – or most people – prove more adaptable and resilient than they guessed - the matter-of-fact, practical measures they take to cope with the daily rapes during the occupation are described with a dispassionate lack of sentimentality that is far more moving than sensationalism would have been.
They got ready for work and Ursula dressed in her ugliest clothes, concealing her figure with large shawls. She helped Dorli to push a pillow up the back of her coat to imitate a hunchback. Schosi became more cheerful – he always found this process hilarious, especially when they scooped redcurrant jam with their fingers and rubbed it over their faces as though it was a lotion. It created the look of weeping sores. He observed Ursula closely as she tied a scarf over her head in the style of an old woman and screwed up her eyes into as many wrinkles as she could; he wrinkled his eyes too and she was glad to giggle with him, to forget for a moment what the strange attire was for.
There are very few unadulterated heroes or villains. In the young nurse Eva Kuster, still capable of being redeemed by her natural compassion, we see what her older colleagues were probably like before they were brutalised by the regime – after all, it is unlikely that most of them joined the profession for the express purpose of abusing the patients. Similarly, some of the Russian soldiers are serial rapists; others decent young men like Pasha. One of the most interesting and moving characters is Herr Esterbauer, the Party member who has cheerfully gone along with Nazi policies until they threaten to affect his own senile mother and his best friend's son Schosi. He shows great courage in their defence; yet it is not certain that this belated decency can altogether redeem his past.
If I have a criticism, indeed, it would concern the character of Anton, in which there is no such light and shade. It would be fascinating to see how Nazism turns him into a monster, but in fact he seems to have been an unpleasant bundle of neuroses already, and settled in his unpleasantness. I don't dispute the possibility of such people, but they don't make very interesting literary characters, because they offer no chance of development, change or redemption. Ursula and her sister Dorli are two ordinary girls who grow up in extraordinary and difficult times, partly damaged by their experiences but also more aware of their own strengths, and it is just their ordinariness that makes us eager to follow their story; it is very easy to see through their eyes.
If I didn't know this was a debut novel, I should not have guessed it for one; the various narrative strands are interwoven with considerable skill and the telling has the kind of assurance that gives the reader confidence in the writer's knowledge of her material. Above all, it really is a genuine page-turner; I read 455 pages in one go because I had to know what happened next.
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Great review.
Date: 2016-02-16 11:57 am (UTC)Re: Great review.
Date: 2016-02-17 01:43 pm (UTC)Re: Great review.
Date: 2016-02-17 02:34 pm (UTC)