The Madonna on the Moon, by Rolf Bauerdick

9780307594129
Knopf, 2013
originally published 2009, as Wei die Madonna auf den Mond kam
translated by David Dollenmayer
402 pp

hardcover

"The spaceflight of a dog opened up Pandora's box."


Nestled at the base of the Carpathian Mountains is a little village called Baia Luna. There's a small school, a church, and a little store that after hours becomes a taproom for the men. Close by there is also a chapel of  the village's patron saint The Virgin of  Eternal Consolation. The owner of the store is Ilja Botev, who lives there with his wife, his daughter, and his teen-aged grandson Pavel; Ilja's best friend is Dimitru Gabor, a gypsy.   As an older man looking back on previous events, Pavel provides the rather cryptic opening of this story, offering the reader a tantalizing hint as to what is to come:

"No one in Baia Luna had the slightest doubt that the source of Ilja Botev’s visions was not some luminous gift of prophetic insight, but the delusions of a wandering mind -- least of all me, Pavel, his grandson. When I was a little boy, I shrugged off my grandfather’s imaginings as foolish fancies, the result of the influence of the Gypsy Dimitru Gabor. Dimitru never gave much of a hoot about the laws of reason and logic. But later, as the solid ground of good common sense grew progressively thin and crumbly beneath Grandfather’s feet, I myself played no small part in the old man’s getting more and more hopelessly tangled up in the net of his fantasies. It was certainly not my intent to have Grandfather make himself the town idiot, the butt of everyone’s jokes, but what could you say about a tavern owner who sets off in a horse and cart on a secret mission to warn the president of the United States about the rocket scientist Wernher von Braun, a mysterious Fourth Power, and an impending international catastrophe? Armed, by the way, with a laughable top secret dossier, a treatise on the mystery of the corporeal Assumption of the Virgin Mary, handwritten and triple-sewn into the lining of his wool jacket."

If the author's purpose here was to provide the proverbial hook, it worked very well in my case. Sustaining the power of this opening was also successful, but then I got to the last one hundred or so pages and well, more on that later.

November 6, 1957 is a day that changes everything.  It's Ilja's birthday, and Sputnik II has successfully launched, carrying Laika the space dog along with it. While Ilja is less than impressed, noting that "The Russian beeping won't fill my belly, " the village priest Johannes Baptiste is greatly concerned, interpreting the Soviet interest in space flight not only as a search for the existence of God, but also for the Virgin Mary,  who, according to a declaration made by Pope Pius in 1950, "at the end of her earthly life was assumed body and soul into heavenly glory."  For him, it's the last straw, and he plans to speak about it the following Sunday as part of his sermon.  Pavel's worries are elsewhere, though. His teacher Angela Barbescu has disappeared.  The last time he'd seen her she'd made him hang a photo of party chief Dr. Stefan Stephanescu on a classroom wall, and as she's doing so, whispers to Pavel  "Send this man straight to hell. Exterminate him!"  When the priest ends up brutally murdered, questions over who did it and why begin to divide the village to the point where Ilja realizes "Baia Luna isn't Baia Luna any more," and that Sputnik "seems to have been a harbinger of the catastrophe that's now upon us."  Pavel sets out on a quest for answers and ultimately for justice,  putting him the middle of a  strange conspiracy that will follow him over the next three decades.  As Pavel is involved in finding out what really happened to Angela Barbescu and Johannes Baptiste, and as Ilja and Dimitru become partners in a "cuckoo idea of two crazy old men" trying to get the Americans involved in getting to the moon before the cosmonauts,  in the background this country (which is obviously Romania)  is changing,  and not all for the good.  There are corrupt party officials who will do whatever it takes to hang on to their power, and with the arrival of the regime of the "Great Conducator," things quickly go from bad to even worse. 

There's so much in this novel to love -- the craziness of two colorful old men whose antics often made me laugh out loud, the people of Baia Luna in general and their responses to what's going outside of their pretty-much isolated world in the modern one, and the historical backdrop of a totalitarian regime -- all of these components, along with Mr. Bauerdick's nearly magical-quality writing and story-telling ability  make the book a highly entertaining  read.  Then I got to about the last hundred pages, where things start to change very quickly.  It's almost as if having been so deeply involved with the people of Baia Luna and the mysteries that are left to Pavel to take care of, the author just got tired. Where the writing before this point was vibrant and the characters filled with life,  it's like in the last one hundred or so pages he rushed to finish the book so that the characters came off sort of hollow.  Toward the very end, it's obvious that the author felt compelled to make sure that this book had a happy ending where everything is tied up in a perfect bow, but it was too pat, overly contrived,  and in making it this way, it's like the author lost whatever spark he had up until then. When I hear myself speaking out loud to an author saying  "please don't do this," well, that's a problem.

While I realize that there are readers out there who will come unglued without a happy ending of some sort, the way this novel ends was just wrong and not in keeping with everything that came before.  Up until then, it was headed for a top place in the one-of-the-best-and-most-entertaining-novels-I've-read category but ultimately, the consistency just wasn't there.  Then again, this is Mr. Bauerdick's first novel, so maybe if he writes a second, he can iron things out.  And even though I had a hard time with the last parts of the book, up to then I was in reading heaven.  I'm just a little disappointed with this one, but it was a great ride while it lasted. 

if a green huntsman offers to help you, take a pass: *The Black Spider, by Jeremias Gotthelf

9781590176689
NYRB Classics, 2013
original title: Die Schwarz Spinne, 1842
translated by Susan Bernofsky 
108 pp

paper

I opened the pages of this little novella not knowing what to expect, and right away found myself embedded in a beautiful arcadian setting in the Emmental region of Switzerland.  Under the sun, shining in "limpid majesty," in a "dell filled with fertile, sheltered farmland," lies a splendid farmhouse near an orchard. Churchbells can be heard in the distance on this "blessed day of celebration," colts are frolicking in the fields, and an entire family has gathered to celebrate a christening.  A huge feast has been laid, the godmother spares no effort in her "intricate preparations" to make herself lovely, and the baby is taken to church for the ceremony.  The scene is one of pastoral perfection, abundance, and peace,

so naturally, I started to get really curious about the book's cover art and why a blurb on the back notes that "The Black Spider was a horror story of its day."  Then the "gotcha": as the post-christening festivities commence, a question about a "rough black window post" built into the newly-built home leads the grandfather to tell a story about events that had occurred  in the area hundreds of years ago, one passed on through the generations.  And oh, what a story it is.

A religious order of Teuton knights has returned from Poland and Prussia, having been sent there to "fight the heathen."  While there, they got caught up in the lifestyle, and on their return, continued to live, each "according to his own nature and pleasure." The worst of these was Hans van Stoffeln of Swabia, and he took a lot of pleasure in persecuting the peasants.  First, he took them away from their land for two years by ordering a huge castle on a hill.  When that was finished, and just as the peasants were rejoicing that they could get back to feeding their starving families and tending their livestock, von Stoffeln makes another demand -- they must now build a shaded walkway. He wants particular trees from a location that is hours away, and he wants everything done within a month or disastrous consequences will follow for the peasants and their families.  Thoroughly in despair, because this is an impossible task, the peasant men wonder how they're going to tell their loved ones.  At that moment a huntsman, dressed in all in green (hitherto referred to as the "green man" or the "green huntsman" ) appears, and offers them help -- and for payment, all he wants is an unbaptized child.  When the women are told what's going on, they believe they can help their men, but it becomes obvious that this is not working out.  One of the wives, Christine of Lindau,  takes up the green huntsman's offer, thinking that when a new baby is born, the people will find a way to deceive him, and they do manage to stave off the devil for a while. However, they hadn't reckoned on the black spider, a reminder that the huntsman "would not suffer himself to be duped without recompense."

So -- what to make of this little book?  Seriously, for such a small volume there's a stream of ideas put into play here, even aside from the obvious Christian message about not turning away from the Lord.   First and foremost,  I read it like this: once evil has made itself known, it can be controlled only if  a community agrees to act together  to keep it at bay. Then the author reveals exactly what sorts of temptations can lead people astray from the collective good. Briefly:

a)  women who, like Christine of Lindau, are "not the sort of woman ...  content to stay at home, quietly going about her duties with no other concern than household and children;" women who are "frightfully clever," "daring," and bold, who don't quite understand their place in the home and in society. There are also women who hold sway over the men in their lives, who become  true masters of their houses, leading sons and husbands to neglect their responsibilities,
b) the lack of  collective and individual responsibility, as in (a) above and other examples throughout the book, especially when actions by a one or a few lead to disregard for the lives of others,
c) people who are not happy enough with what they already  have -- as the people became jealous of the riches and high living of others, their desire for wealth and their "vainglorious grandeur" led them to be as hardhearted and ruthless toward their own servants as the knights once were toward the peasants,
d) and last but not least, when children do not  "follow their parents in their paths and thoughts,"  and disregard wisdom passed down through the ages. 

And what about the spider? Well, I'm not very well versed in Germanic mythologies or Swiss folklore regarding the symbolism of the spider, but I did look up "green huntsman" to see if there was something significant I could use relating to  this book and came across this photo of a green huntsman spider.

Coincidence? Maybe, but in Christian mythology, the spider is, of course,  associated with the Devil, and you've got the Green Huntsman of the story in that role as the source of  the spider, so it should be easy to figure out.  However, according to Terrence Rafferty of the New York Times, the spider also becomes a symbol of plague, and there are scenes in this book that support this idea as well.

Even if you're not so inclined toward the Christian messages (as in my case), you can still enjoy The Black Spider.  There are a number of scenes that are bound to produce that wonderful frisson of chills crawling up your spine, making it a perfect pre-Halloween read; it's also a peek into a specific society at a specific time and place making it a good story for historical fiction readers.

The Collini Case, by Ferdinand von Schirach

9780718159191
Michael Joseph/Penguin, 2012
originally published as Der Fall Collini, 2011
translated by Anthea Bell
191 pp
(hardcover)

"You are who you are."

Actually, I had posted my discussion of this book at the crime segments part of my reading journal, but as it turns out, The Collini Case turned out to be less of a novel of crime fiction than I had expected, so I'm reposting it here. Obviously it doesn't fit the category of American novels, but it's very much worth mentioning. 

Much like Pia Juul's The Murder of Halland, The Collini Case is a novel based on the commission of a crime yet it really isn't crime fiction per se. There is a murder, but the focus of this novel is more on what lies beneath the decision of a retired Mercedes-Benz toolmaker to walk into a man's hotel room, shoot him, and then brutally kick him -- breaking all of the bones in his head while grinding his shoe into the man's face.  While it's a novel, the book is really not meant to be entertaining; on the contrary, it is a story designed with a specific purpose in mind. If you're looking for the typical whodunit kind of read, pass on this one; it's not a staggering legal thriller, nor is it meant to be. 
 
In an interview at BBC Radio 4, Von Schirach notes that when he writes about crime, the whodunit is not important to him, but rather it is the motive behind criminal acts that he finds interesting.  This is certainly the case in his novel, where Fabrizio Collini, a long-time worker at Mercedes Benz,  makes an appointment with a wealthy industrialist at his hotel in Berlin. Posing as a journalist, Collini is welcomed into the man's room, where he promptly proceeds to put four bullets into the man's head, and repeatedly grind his shoe into the dead man's face. When the act is finished, he goes downstairs, asks the woman at the front desk to inform the police that the man in room 400 is dead, then quietly waits to be arrested.  It isn't long before he is taken into custody, but when his lawyer, Caspar Leinen, arrives, Collini provides only minimal answers. Yet he will not answer the crucial question as to why he killed the man.  Leinen, a new defense attorney, knows he's going to have his work cut out for him; but little does he understand the ramifications of taking on Collini's defense.  

The Collini Case is difficult to summarize without ruining it for prospective readers, but even in its spare, understated tone, this slow-paced story is powerful and gets to the thematic issue of guilt as determined by a person's circumstances. Also present throughout the story is the idea of justice in the present world where the past still has a strong foothold within a system that may have very well failed at its own mission.  While these themes are writ large, there's also a side trip into the reflections of one's own life in the light of revelations of  family secrets.  You may think as you read that you know what's coming down the pike, but trust me, that's not really the case.

Ferdinand von Schirach is himself a criminal attorney with a past not unlike that of some of the characters in The Collini Case.  While some readers found it "predictable," "pedestrian," and found that the core issue may have been better served in a pamphlet or magazine article, I have to disagree.  It is an all-too human story about the consequences that evolve out of fundamental wrongs within the system that somehow everyone overlooked, with devastating results all around.  I think people started into the book with expectations of a legal thriller and the fact that it came out to be something entirely different may have proved disappointing,  but that's certainly not the fault of the author.

While true blue mystery/crime fiction fans may not find what they're looking for in this book, to me it was an eye-opening story with a punch.  Perhaps a crime-fiction audience isn't the best market for this novel, but it's quite an engaging read that I finished in one sitting.  Now I'm going to pull out my copies of his other books Crime and Guilt which have been collecting dust on my shelves; I can't wait to read what else this man has written.  Definitely recommended.

Visitation, by Jenny Erpenbeck

9780811218351
New Directions Publishing
2010
Originally published as Heimsuchung, 2008
translated by Susan Bernofsky

 "As the day is long and the world is old, many people can stand in the same place, one after the other." -- Georg Büchner

"If I came to you,
O woods of my youth, could you
Promise me peace once again?" -- Friedrich Holderlin

"When the house is finished, Death enters." -- Arabic proverb

Opening with the above epigraphs, Visitation is a rather stunning, although very short, novel of historical fiction that offers the stories of the inhabitants of a lakefront summer house in the woods of Brandenburg through the movement of time and history in Germany.   The prologue opens twenty-four thousand years ago with an advancing glacier, then progresses geologically over the years until the Brandenburg lakes began to form. As the land comes to be settled, it too follows a natural progression -- it is parceled off and sold, a beautiful home is built, land is added, subtracted, reparceled, etc.  The slow and natural progression of the landscape stands in stark contrast to the rapid events that play out throughout Germany and all of its accompanying turmoil as decades pass, but at the same time, what ultimately happens to this land and to the house mirrors what happens in this country during the twentieth century. 

 It is on one of these lakes that  a wealthy farmer owns a large tract of land, and his daughters are each slated to receive their own parcels as their respective inheritances. But the farmer sells off parts of the land designated for his daughter Klara in three parts, to a coffee and tea importer,  a Jewish manufacturer of fine cloth and an architect from Berlin, who is the builder of a fine house of  “quality German workmanship.”  The rise of the Nazis and the second world war result in changes of occupancy and ownership once again, and the home is requisitioned by the Russian Army as the soldiers come into Germany to liberate the country. As the powers that be begin to contemplate and to build the Berlin wall,  the land and the home begin another round of inhabitants under the collectivization policies of the government of the GDR (East Germany).  The fall of the wall and its aftermath also bring about their own changes.  Through the entire story, the house and the land undergo a series of transformations, and the only thing that remains constant is the character of "The Gardener," a somewhat mysterious and symbolic figure whose story of the work he does on the land is related after each chapter. The author offers brief but very powerful glimpses into the stories of the residents as they move in and lay down a foundation of memories and histories.  Happy times spent there also serve as a safe haven and an anchor for some characters in times far removed from their carefree days on the lake.  Through it all people live out their private lives in the house and on its grounds, often in contrast to the very public upheavals that have occurred in a century of Germany's history. 

This novel is highly reminiscent of Simon Mawer's excellent novel The Glass Room, where the author brought the events of  twentieth-century European history to a particular house.  But Visitation is vastly different -- where Mawer's book set forth the events of history chronologically in a traditional narrative style, Visitation isn't what most readers would consider a "conventional" novel.  It's based more on differing personal perspectives rather than a straightforward chronicle of events.  Within each chapter, people and events often float back and forth in time with no warning, and it can be a little disconcerting until you feel like you have more of a bigger picture.  Erpenbeck writes her chapters in long paragraphs, so that a single event and connected thoughts are covered, generally relating back to the opening of the chapter so that events can shift or things can get a bit tangential before the chapter circles back and is over.  There are times when the prose seems to transform from narrative to melody, as the author often repeats certain lines like refrains from a poem or song.  And just as the style becomes comfortable,  the author gives the reader a jolt. There are a couple of times where this happens -- first in a heartbreaking chapter from the perspective of a little girl in the Warsaw Ghetto (the only chapter that takes place away from the house), and second in a most disturbing chapter from the point of view of a Russian army officer.  There are a few parts of the book that may seem tedious -- pieces of folklore, official documents, minor details about the house and grounds etc., but these things genuinely fit into and enhance the story and should not be glossed over.  The characters have their own personas and voices, each with his or her own story, thoughts and feelings, all most excellently captured by the translator, and you cannot help but get caught up in these lives. 

It's a beautiful book, and all of the things that make it less than conventional -- plus Erpenbeck's focus on the landscape (if even briefly) "coming to resemble itself once more"  despite all of the tumult in our private lives and the world in which we live -- are what appealed to me as a reader.  It's a challenging book, but if your focus is on the bigger picture rather than a chapter here and there, it's ultimately a rewarding reading experience.

fiction from Germany