The Dark Room
by
Rachel
Seiffert
Americas
Africa
&
Asia
Europe
|
Can the past yield itself
to us more freely as it recedes? Two absorbing debut novels set out to
map new terrain within the far-reaching, ever-shifting minefield of writing
related to the Nazi era. Both of these portraits, drawn in starkly contrasting
tones, argue with grace and candour for the need to hold and turn over
in our hands history's more unlikely protagonists. Told from the periphery
of World War II, these two remarkable new works circle towards rather than
insist upon the momentous.
Rachel Seiffert, author of The Dark Room,
is a thirty-year-old English woman living in Germany whose triptych of
three generations of Germans confronts the willful blindness and silences
surrounding fascism.
Helmut, kept from fighting in the war because
of a physical deformity, works as a photographer's assistant in 1930's
Berlin. Drawn to the grandeur of the new architecture and the Reich's progressive
rhetoric, he begins to chronicle the city, its new train terminals, proud
citizens and flowing red banners. However, his acute eye for capturing
movement and crowds notices a slow evacuation of the city as Nazi expansion
shifts into gear. And Helmut diligently continues to record the subsequent
details as Berlin is emptied of its youth, bombed and ultimately occupied.
Confined to the camera's field of vision, Helmut steadfastly guards his
pride in the Reich even as tanks roll into the city.
The middle section tells the harrowing journey
of five suddenly homeless siblings as the war ends. Led by Lore, the eldest
daughter, they cross four occupied zones in search of their grandmother,
after their parents, both party members, have been interned. Continually
on the verge of starvation, they accept the help of a fellow refugee (a
survivor of Buchenwald), and the reality of the Holocaust slowly etches
itself into Lore's awareness. |
Finally, Micha is a young German teacher driven
to unearth the truth about his grandfather's wartime activity. Set in the
late 1990's, Micha is unnerved by the way they commemorate the liberation
of the camps each year at his school. "The students read survivors' accounts.
Everyone cries these we-didn't-do-it tears. Then the essays get marked,
the displays are packed away, and we move right on to the next project."
A hitherto ignored doubt regarding his beloved grandfather's nine-year
imprisonment in Russia following the war becomes a consuming need to know.
As Micha travels to Belarus in order to find and expose the unknowable,
Seiffert's sober eloquence builds to an emotionally indelible climax.
| In contrast, The Right
Hand of Sleep is a far more lyrical, ambitious, if slightly self-conscious,
look into the moral ambivalence of the Nazi era. John Wray is an American
of Austrian descent whose mother's family history figured prominently in
the underpinning of the book. The novel's hero, Oskar Voxlauer, returns
to his hometown in Austria twenty years after having deserted the Austro-Hungarian
Army and fled to Russia towards the end of the Great War. The opening section
brilliantly evokes Faulkner with its shifting narrative, shuttling between
his life in Russia as a devout Communist and husband to his re-entry, disillusioned
and bereaved, into an Austria on the brink of annexation.
Voxlauer's attempt to forget the tremors of the
past--his father's suicide, his wife's death, the trench nightmares and
brutal killings--by exiling himself to the bucolic hills outside the town
is refused at every turn by the growing hatred around him. As Voxlauer's
self-imposed exile becomes ever more compromised by a new love affair,
the need to defend an old friend, and an increasingly menacing SS, Wray deftly
balances an intricate mixture of political intrigue, ardour for nature,
and moral consequence with true precision. From the period tone of dialogue
to the cinematic flashbacks, Wray pushes his novel precariously close to
pastiche only to rescue it brilliantly every time.
Born in the same year (1971), Seiffert and Wray
have written novels of integrity, seriousness, and abundant beauty devoid
of any sentimentality or irony. A true feat in any age--but particularly
ours.
Fionn Meade  |
The
Right Hand of Sleep
by
John
Wray
Americas
Africa
&
Asia
Europe
|
|
