IT IS NOT SURPRISING THAT THIS book, The Blind Side of the Heart – original title Die Mittagsfrau, won the German Book Prize, equivalent, I suppose, of the Booker or the Prix Goncourt. It is a rich, moving and complex novel. It demands close attentio
n from the reader, and deserves to get it. One German critic called it "a great novel, a story without a happy end, a period painting that deals with destiny and involvement in historical events – a family story told with painful precision" . This is an accurate assessment.
It opens with a prologue set in 1945. Peter is a seven year-old boy, living in Stettin on the Baltic. The Russians have already occupied the city. He has seen his mother raped by three soldiers, though he doesn't understand the significance of what he has seen. His mother is a nurse, exhausted by long hours of work in appalling conditions. She may love Peter as he certainly loves her, but he demands more of her than she can give. He has become an encumbrance and when at last there is word of a train that will take them away from Stettin, which will no longer be a German city, she deserts him at the station. Her action is shocking; nevertheless Julia Franck's skill is such that we understand it, though Peter will never be able to do so, or to forgive her.
The novel then tracks back to 1914 when Peter's mother Helene is herself a young girl, living in a small town in rural Prussia. Her father, proprietor of a small printing business, is about to go to war. Their Jewish mother sees his obedience to the call-up as desertion. She retreats into a neurosis which will intensify with the years. She has always resented Helene, who arrived after four sons had either died in infancy or been stillborn. Helene and her elder sister Martha, who is already a nurse, have to take over the management of the household, with the help of their Wendish maid, while Helene, still a child, is responsible for the business's book-keeping. When their father finally returns from the war, wounded and dying, their mother's withdrawal becomes complete.
The girls get, eventually, to Berlin to stay with an aunt; Martha's lover Leontine is already there. Helene, now a nurse herself, falls in love. Her fiancé dies. She marries Wilhelm, an engineer making the new autobahns. The marriage is awkward. Peter is born, the war breaks out and Wilhelm deserts her. Bombs fall. Nerves are on edge, though the little boy is happy. The Russians arrive. Helene at last begins to understand her own mother's inadequacies, recognises that like her she suffers from the same "blindness of the heart". The novel returns to Peter, working as a farmhand on an uncle's farm, for the epilogue, which will, like earlier passages in the novel, centre on an act of rejection.
A brief summary cannot do justice to the penetrating imagination of this book, to the author's certainty of tone and to the wealth of significant detail she provides. No doubt much research has gone to its making, but the research has been thoroughly absorbed and is never obtrusive; instead, it is illuminated and brought to life by the vividness of the author's imaginative sympathy. She offers a panorama of a society stumbling blindfold to disaster. Yet this is not what is often called "a social novel" – one, that is, in which the importance of a public theme is so often allowed to smother the individual significance of the characters. On the contrary, Franck presents us with utterly convincing people who are tested to the limit and then beyond it.
The narrative is gripping, the atmosphere densely oppressive. The tone has the authority which comes only when people, feelings, thoughts, scenes, and actions have been so thoroughly imagined that you can't conceive of events turning out otherwise than they are presented. Franck doesn't take sides; but no more does she condemn. You are left with the thought that, yes, people might have acted otherwise – but only if they had not been what and who they were.
German critics have praised the quality of the prose, and I would think this a very difficult novel for the translator, Anthea Bell, to render into English. She has done it admirably, retaining the feel (one supposes) of the original while presenting it in natural and flexible English. Julia Franck may well have written a great novel; it will be interesting to return to it in, say, a couple of years to see if that initial judgment made on a single reading stands up. I rather think it will.
The full article contains 802 words and appears in The Scotsman newspaper.
