“Leonard had let them go alone with the young boy who Ali was now convinced, was a couple falafel's short of a picnic”
― L.R. Currell, Curve Day
THE REVIEW
Back to Back by Julia Franck
(from The Telegraph)
All tragedy and despair, ideological fervour and romantic failure, the history of Julia Franck’s family mirrors Germany’s shattering 20th century, each generation displaying the wounds of nine decades of division.
After tackling her father’s side in her award-winning novel The Blind Side of the Heart – a fictionalised account of her father’s mother, who abandoned him in 1945 when he was a baby, her capacity for love exhausted by two wars and the brutality of the rampaging Red Army – she has moved on to her mother’s line in her new novel, Back to Back, superbly translated into English by Anthea Bell.
Like Franck’s real-life maternal grandmother, Ingeborg Hunzinger, Back to Back’s Kathe is a Jewish sculptor who, having fled to Italy to escape the Nazis, has returned to East Berlin to make art that glorifies Walter Ulbricht’s German Democratic Republic. Preoccupied with work and the fatherland, she is a distant, bullying mother to teenagers Thomas and Ella, who, with their father long dead, have to fend largely for themselves.
Which for brittle, beautiful Ella means enduring sexual abuse at the hands of a Stasi lodger, from which she escapes by retreating into fantasy and her weird intense relationship with Thomas, one year her junior, and himself increasingly ground down by his mother and the daily humiliations of the GDR’s bureaucracy.
Indifferent to the misery around her, Kathe continues to carve, hacking away at the stone that seems, subtly, to represent Germany and its history. The characters feel like people carved out of this stone. Halfway through the novel Thomas, despite his top grades, is dispatched to the mines. Skinny and afraid of the dark, his soul full of poetry and desire, he is broken by the experience, by the realisation that he too is inescapably made from this stone, as was Franck’s uncle Gottlieb Friedrich Franck, on whom Thomas is modelled and whose poetry is used throughout.
Like an expert geologist, Franck is digging deep into her family’s extraordinary history creating things of great beauty from its dark recesses. Diamond-hard and full of glittering prose, Back to Back is a powerful and moving book. I suspect there are more gems to come.
THE LIST
(from The Telegraph)
100 Novels Everybody Should Read: 100 Novels
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