Stones from the River Book

I've got a German friend who every time the war is mentioned suffers a rush of blood to her face and looks physically pained. She continually makes me realise what a struggle it is for sensitive, generous spirited Germans to come to terms with what happened under the Nazis. And this despite one of her great grandfathers taking part in the coup against Hitler and being hanged. I mention this because the author of this novel is German and this novel, to some extent, is an attempt at atonement. Unfortunately, not a very good one in my eyes.

It begins in 1915 in an invented German town. The husband has been wounded in the war; the wife is a deeply troubled soul and is horrified when she realises she has given birth to a dwarf child, Trudie. For a while these three characters are compelling. The unrelenting challenges to her self-esteem Trudie faces are well done and we don't blame her for becoming somewhat mean spirited towards the residents of the town. Later in the novel she will work in the library where she collects damning stories about her fellow inhabitants. But we're told this; never shown it and as a sub plot it never meshed into the narrative drive. Unfortunately, this is anything but a tightly focused novel and the narrative soon begins wandering far and wide. Innumerable other characters are introduced, none of them particularly memorable and the book begins to take the obese form of a soap opera. It also wanders towards magical realism at times but then pulls back. There are also dream sequences and the temptation to start skimming took hold before I reached the 100-page mark.

When the Nazis take power the book becomes interesting for troubling reasons. It's essentially a rather benign depiction of everyday Germans under Nazi rule. Kristallnacht is quickly brushed over in Hegi's invented German town. To be honest, I felt there was a catastrophic failure of imagination on Hegi's part to evoke German life under Nazi rule. I couldn't help drawing parallels with the infinitely superior Alone in Berlin, also written by a German but a German who didn't shy away from dramatizing the ensuing vile predatory behaviour when a state encourages its members to vent everything most base in their nature. Even from the point of view of cranking up dramatic tension it's odd Hegi chose not to include a single hateful Nazi in her narrative. The murder of the Jews is never mentioned in this novel. They have "disappeared" as if they might simply be living someone else. Towards the end of the novel Hegi even tells us a few Jews returned to her invented town. The most passionate display of narrative outrage is at the bombing of Dresden. It's as if she uses the dwarf theme to act as a kind of smokescreen to hide the outrages inflicted on the Jews. The cruelties Trudie goes through are not peculiar to Nazi Germany; they would occur in any society. If this book were the only information we had about Nazi Germany, Nazi Germany wouldn't stand out as being significantly more evil than many other political regimes in world history.

But this isn't the reason I didn't like this novel. It was the continual snowstorms of incidental detail, the repetitive blundering up blind alleys and the unrelenting introduction of gratuitous characters which prevented me from connecting with this book which is probably twice as long as it needs to be. A buddy read with Elyse. (It took me about a month longer to read than it did Elyse!)