(2/18/2023)
How do you learn about the generations before you? In this autobiographical novel, the narrator delves into the lives of her grandmother Maria, her mother, Grete, her uncles, and her aunt in Austria during WWI. Maria's husband Josef is away fighting. The family has little food and virtually no interaction with the villagers. Maria's beauty is something of a curse, and Mayor Fink who has been deputized to look after her, feels its pull, as does a German stranger.
The novel moves forward in a winding pattern with the relation of wartime events punctuated by details about the future fate of Maria's siblings. Apart from the narrator, the most present character is Aunt Kathe, a wise woman and source of much of the family's trauma-filled history.
I didn't love this book, but I admired the way Helfer wove in single strands of memory or fact and then re-introduced these elements later, often fleshed out. Although short, this book deserves careful reading and might prompt readers to recall what they know and what they intuit about previous generations in their own family.