Book reviews

Last Train from Liguria

Christine Dwyer Hickey

Atlantic Books

€14.99

This is a fascinating study of the relationship between three troubled people – a man, a woman and a child –  during the preparatory stages of World War ll.

It opens in Dublin in 1925, where Edward, a binge drinker, wakes to discover that he’s murdered his sister. His only contact abroad is Signor Barzonni, his former music teacher, and this triggers his impulse to escape to Italy.

After some years, Edward ends up in the seaside resort of Bordighera, teaching music to Alec, the ‘not quite right’ son of a Jewish heiress and her dying husband.

In 1933, the plain, unfortunately-named Bella, is sent away to become a tutor to Alec. Up to now, she has led a restricted life in London with her widowed father, to whom she is overly-devoted. Possibly due to an early trauma, she reveals obsessive compulsive tendencies and has borderline anorexia.

Alec, who today would be diagnosed with Asperger’s Syndrome, is distraught that he’s been sent to the family’s summer residence, away from his beloved father. But in time, this odd trio forms a bond that sustains them through the next few years, as Mussolini’s fascism begins to take hold.

Dwyer Hickey’s portrayal of the impact of Mussolini’s increasingly anti-Jewish policies is superbly achieved. We get a sense of the political atmosphere subtly, in the presence of children in Fascist uniforms, a beach puppet show where Hitler is ridiculed to much laughter (except for some affronted German tourists), occasional conversation about newspaper headlines – ‘all this fuss about Czechoslovakia’; ‘that Hitler thug’ – and one character phoning from Vienna who mentions ‘swastikas hanging from every window… The whole damn town overrun with German soldiers.’ In this way, the presence of war becomes increasingly felt, until Alec is directly threatened, and they must make plans to flee to London. But Edward’s dark secret makes this a risky prospect.

The story moves back and forth between three characters over several decades, using an interesting variety of narrative forms. We also meet Anna, in 1990s Dublin, who discovers a long-kept secret and tries to unravel it before her grandmother dies.

Evocatively reminiscent of Henry James, with lyrical, sometimes visceral imagery, Last Train from Liguria is an assured and  richly textured contribution to Irish and European literature.

Reviewed in The Irish Examiner.

 The Memory Keeper’s Daughter

Kim Edwards

Penguin Books

€12.60

There is something in the delicacy of Kim Edwards’ style that echoes Niall Williams. Images and details fall, like light, onto the page. Layers of memories and dreams also form a collage, until the minds of Edwards’ characters seem as intimate as our own.

The story starts during a snowstorm in 1964, the night Norah Henry goes into labour. She chooses names: Phoebe for a girl, Paul for a boy. Her husband David, an orthopaedic surgeon, realises they won’t make it to the hospital, and takes Norah to his clinic. There, with the help of his nurse Caroline, he delivers two babies. His wife is heavily sedated, and unaware that there is a second, unexpected delivery.

When David sees that the second infant, a girl, has Down’s Syndrome, he recalls his sister, who had a heart defect and died as a child, causing his mother intense grief. There and then, he makes a decision. He hands the infant to Caroline, instructing her to take it to an institution for the disabled.

Telling Norah she has a healthy son, but she also delivered a girl, who died, he is completely unprepared for the devastating grief that overwhelms her.

Meanwhile, Caroline, who is in love with David, and a plain, solitary woman, finds she cannot leave Phoebe at the institution. She goes home, packs up her meagre belongings, and disappears with the baby, after driving past the memorial service Norah insists on holding.

The challenge of fighting for Phoebe, and having her as a daughter transforms Caroline’s life, and through Phoebe, she also finds love.

Sensing something amiss always, Norah drifts away from David, and seeks solace in her own secret pursuits. She gives David a camera for a birthday, and from there on, he becomes obsessed with recording memories, even building his own darkroom.

Paul grows up in a house heavy with the burden of a secret, also feeling the vacuum of his sister’s absence.  The family fragments, with David desperately trying to keep a sense of togetherness via his photographs. He makes a journey back to the home of his childhood, returning with a young girl in tow, to his family’s consternation.

The Memory Keeper’s Daughter is a heart-wrenching journey of self-discovery for each of the characters, and demands to be re-read simply for the beauty of the language.

Reviewed in The Irish Examiner. 

A Reliable Wife

Robert Goolrick

Little, Brown

€11.60

The premise of Goolrick’s debut novel is intriguing: an ad placed in a newspaper in Wisconsin, 1907: ‘Country businessman seeks reliable wife. Compelled by practical, not romantic, reasons.’ From the outset, the weather and the setting take a prominent place in the development of the story. Bitterly cold, the air is electric with a bone-deep chill, blizzards and the blinding white of snow. The intensity of it all is so profoundly penetrating that it leads to unnatural acts, unnatrual deaths in the community.

Ralf Truitt is not a young man. At 54, he has spent twenty years alone, after finding his beautiful first wife in bed with her music teacher. He banished both of them. poured his remaining love on his daughter, who died soon after, and expended all his bitterness and anger on his son, who may not have been his blood at all. Hating his father passionately, the boy ran away from the beatings the moment he turned 14. Now a successful but lonely businessman, Ralf wants to make amends. Catherine, who has replied to the ad, has her own dark secrets. Instead of a photograph of herself, she sends one of her plain cousin, and writes: ‘I am a simple, honest woman.’ Ralf accepts her out of all the applications he receives.

He is shocked when, on her arrival, he discovers she is beautiful, and therefore a liar. He vows to send her back immediately, but an accident occurs first, where she saves his life. Now beholden to her, he changes his mind. There is something he needs her to do.

Ralf had built an exotic Italian mansion for his first wife, and now opens it up again for Catherine. She is attracted to the buried garden and sudies exotic plants and flowers to recreate it. Yet, for the reader, there is something unnatural about the garden in this environment. The house too, with its lavish ostentation, is as intoxicating as a poisonous drug.

Goolrick mentions that he owes the genesis and structure of his novel to  Michael Lesy, whose book Wisconsin Death Trip had a profound influence on him.

I feel that  he may have been over–reliant. The writing style of this murder ballad is heavy, repetitive and somewhat inconsistent. Yet there is something seductively surreal about it, the occasional surprise,  and a gratifying conclusion.

Reviewed in The Irish Examiner 

A Woman in Berlin

Anonymous

Virago Press

€21.99

What distinguishes this war diary from any other I’ve read is the quality of this dispassionate, intently observed account by a journalist who also has experience of working in a publishing house. It begins on the 16^th April, 1945, when Soviet tanks finally reached the outskirts of Berlin. Now isolated into random small groups, civilians burrow into basements for protection from the inevitable onslaught of artillery fire, air raids, looting, and rape.

Rape in wartime is a ‘collective experience’, the writer observes, with some individuals, including herself, negotiating for the best possible outcome by selecting the highest ranking ‘wolf’ from the pack and enticing him to keep the others at bay. It soon begins to feel like prostitution, as the selected officer brings rations to eat. Morality blurs into inconsequence in the fight for survival. Hunger also dulls fear, and women take the risk of going out to search for nettles, water and to collect their potato rations.

People soon get over the shock of seeing corpses wheeled along and buried in shallow garden graves. Virgins are hidden in the quarantined hospital, although some are inevitably caught. The changing dynamics between women and their defeated men, who are shamed by their inability to protect them, also involve the men’s psychological difficulty in returning to their multi-raped women.

What is especially fascinating is what happens to a conquered city in the aftermath of defeat. As men are still returning from the front, and children have been evacuated, it is mainly women who are put to work clearing rubble, and sacking the city for the victors who remove anything valuable to Russia.

Ultimately, the writing of this diary helps the writer to preserve her sanity in a world of chaos and moral breakdown. Yet self-pity is absent, and what shines through clearly is an uplifting resilience. Although published in 1954 in eight languages, however, it was only published in Germany in 1959. The book was received with deep discomfort, as the taboos of mass rape and the subsequent behaviour of German men and women were exposed. The anonymous author, who also protected other identities, chose not to have the book reprinted until after her death as a result, and it is only now that the book can reappear.

In the sociological context of wartime behaviour, it is an astonishing, deeply affecting record. Highly recommended.

Reviewed in The Irish Examiner.