As I've mentioned, I teach a book discussion class called “A Sneak Peek at Next Year’s Bestsellers,” in which we read books in galley form pre-publication. Lots of fun, great discussions, and always fun to try to anticipate what the reviewers will say and then see if we’re right. We have a good track record. In previous sessions of this class we read The Story of Edgar Sawtelle by David Wroblewski and loved it. It went on to be a New York Times bestseller. We read Lark + Termite by Jayne Ann Phillips and thought it was genius. The reviewers concurred. We’ve read Margaret Atwood, Lev Grossman, Ann Packer, David Leavitt, David Ebershoff, Ron Rash, Pete Dexter, Pat Conroy, Valerie Martin, and more!
In this current session of Sneak Peek, we started with The Blindness of the Heart by Julia Franck (published by Grove Press). I chose this book because it was the winner of the German Book Prize and an international bestseller, and I thought it would be good for us to read a book from abroad and a book for which we were reading a translation. I also thought, since the book deals with World War II, it would be interesting to read a German writer’s perspective.
We were not disappointed. The book spans a time frame starting during World War I and ending after World War II, so we did indeed get some insight into how some Germans experienced the war. What was most stunning was how, in the parts that took place during WWII, there seemed to have been little awareness of or attention paid to the plight of the Jews. Why don’t you go to Mr. So-and-So’s button shop? one character asks. Oh, he’s not there anymore, goes the reply – he moved away. Well, obviously he didn’t move away. Obviously this man with a Jewish name was forcibly removed. Does the fact that all the Jewish shops are closed, that all the Jewish residents are no longer there, mean anything to you, the reader wonders? Are you able to convince yourself that they all just coincidentally decided to move?
Several weeks after our class met, the book was reviewed favorably in The New York Times. The reviewer seemed to downplay the part of the book we all found most shocking and disturbing. The book begins with a Prologue in which a character named Alice, who is a nurse, lives with her young son Peter (he’s about 8) in a war-torn city which they are trying to escape. Life there clearly entails much hardship and trauma, such as when the boy is walking along with a friend and bombs begin to drop, and shortly he finds himself holding his friend’s hand—-only his hand, for that is all that is left of his friend. At another point Alice is visited by, and raped by, enemy soldiers.
Finally Alice and Peter make their escape when a train comes to town. They make their way aboard the crowded train on to the next major station, where they disembark. Alice sits Peter down on a bench, explains to him she is going to find tickets for the next stage of their journey, and tells him to stay put until she returns. And then she walks away, never to return.
It is stunning to read of a mother abandoning her child this way, and stunned we were.
The book then moves to a period just before and during World War I, in a family in another town with two young daughters. Eventually we learn that one of these daughters, although her name is Helene at the time, is the girl who will become Alice the nurse. We are taken through her life and her experience in war-torn Germany, until we are finally brought back around to the moment where she will leave her son, supposedly, at this point, with a greater understanding of the characters, the situation, and their motivation.
The book touches on so many issues: Germany at war and how this shaped its people, German culture and important writers, artists, and thinkers, love and coming of age. And yet for us, the central question was the question of how can a mother abandon her child? As we learned more about Julia Franck’s background, we learned that her father had in fact been abandoned during the war by his own mother, hence we can imagine that this significant item in her family history has for the author, as well, long been a burning and perplexing question.
It’s a thoughtful, well-written and interesting book, although I find that it’s written in a rather emotionally dry tone, keeping one at some remove from the strength of its characters’ feeling. The Times reviewer calls it “remorseless” – a good word for it.
NY Times review:
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/17/books/review/Schillinger-t.html?_r=1&scp=1&sq=blindness%20of%20the%20heart&st=cse
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