Maja Haderlap, Angel of Oblivion, Trans. by Tess Lewis, Archipelago, 2016
Haderlap is an accomplished poet, and that lyricism leaves clear traces on this ravishing debut, which won the prestigious Bachmann Prize in 2011. The descriptions are sensual, and the unusual similes and metaphors occasionally change perspective unexpectedly. Angel of Oblivion deals with harrowing subjects - murder, torture, persecution and discrimination of an ethnic minority - in intricate and lyrical prose.
The novel tells the story of a family from the Slovenian minority in Austria. The first-person narrator starts off with her childhood memories of rural life, in a community anchored in the past. Yet behind this rural idyll, an unresolved conflict is smouldering. At first, the child wonders about the border to Yugoslavia, which runs not far away from her home. Then gradually the stories that the adults tell at every opportunity start to make sense. All the locals are scarred by the war. Her grandfather, we find out, was a partisan fighting the Nazis from forest hideouts. Her grandmother was arrested and survived Ravensbrück.
As the narrator grows older, she finds out more. Through conversations at family gatherings and long nights talking to her grandmother, she learns that her father was arrested by the Austrian police and tortured - at the age of ten - to extract information on the whereabouts of his father. Her grandmother lost her foster-daughter and many friends and relatives in Ravensbrück and only escaped the gas chamber by hiding inside the camp itself. The narrator begins to notice the frequent suicides and violent deaths in her home region, and she develops an eye for how the Slovenians are treated by the majority of German-speaking Austrians. As an adult, the narrator becomes politicised and openly criticises the way in which Austria deals with the war and its own Nazi past. In the closing section, she visits Ravensbrück and finds it strangely lifeless - realising that her personal memories of her grandmother are stronger.
Illuminating an almost forgotten chapter of European history and the European present, the book deals with family dynamics scarred by war and torture - a dominant grandmother, a long-suffering mother, a violent father who loves his children but is impossible to live with. And interwoven with this is compelling reflection on storytelling: the narrator hoping to rid herself of the emotional burden of her past and to tell stories on behalf of those who cannot.
2017 PEN America Translation Prize winner"Searingly lyrical...Haderlap's is a significant achievement, hopefully a herald of more to come. An arresting evocation of memory, community, and suffering." — Kirkus Reviews
"Haderlap plunges readers into a morass of European history..." — Publishers Weekly
"is inflected with a staccato rhythm—a rush of present-tense observation—that reveals the writer to be a poet at heart... Haderlap's first-person story is authored with the intense sensorial recollections of a child. The book's relevance is its articulation of the long-lasting burden of cultural and semantic chasms that—even generations later—are far from resolved." — Jessica Morgan, Artforum
"Along with everything else she accomplishes with this powerful work — a work of historical witness, a Sebaldian descent into the depths of memory, and a brave and innovative hybrid of fiction and memoir — Haderlap (and her English translator) deserve praise for breaking the silence to bring the stories of Slovenian-speaking Austrians to a much broader audience." — Brendan Driscoll, in The Millions
"[Angel of Oblivion] captures nuances of fleeting emotion thanks to Haderlap’s long-exercised lyric talent while also furnishing as riveting and lucid an account of the Austrian Slovenes in their suffering during and after World War II as will be found in any history book." — Vincent Kling, Translation Review
"A sparkling and hugely sympathetic English translation.... Maja Haderlap is a dramaturge and a poet and her prose is full of rich poetic images and constructions. It is a profoundly beautiful and deeply upsetting novel worthy of all the prizes." — European Literature Network
"Angel of Oblivion is a beautifully poetic novel about a young girl navigating the treacherous terrain between two hostile communities and two extremely burdened languages: Slovenian as a language of heroic resistance and continued humiliations suffered, and German, a way out of her stifling rural upbringing but also the language of the camps, which her Grandmother barely survived and many family members didn’t." — Festival Neue Literatur
"[A] painstaking and emotional account of the Slovenian-speaking minority in Austria during and after World War II." — Abby Sheaffer, ChicagoNow
"Haderlap’s novel seems to transcend the boundaries between languages and histories." — Iga Nowicz, The Glossa
"Angel of Oblivion, with its doomed and colourful cast of real-life characters, as well as multiple cruel twists of fate, is a devastating story, never less than wholeheartedly told." — Eileen Battersby, The Irish Times
"Haderlap’s novel brings to mind the work of artist Anselm Kiefer ... His paintings evoke the same desolate feeling of a landscape, natural and mental, poisoned by the Holocaust. Though Kiefer’s art is influenced by foreign myths and symbols, there is that same idea that Maja Haderlap confronts in Angel of Oblivion: that even the generation born after the fall of the Third Reich is affected by its legacy." — Devan Brettkelly, ZYZZYVA
"Haderlap delivers a powerful and affecting story about memory, identity and wartime persecution and retaliation. Inspired by the experiences of Haderlap’s family and other Carinthian Slovenes (the Slovenian-speaking minority in southern Austria), Angel of Oblivion offers a compelling character study and shines a necessary light on a small enclave and less-well known chapter of 20th-century European history...Tess Lewis has done a fine job of translating Haderlap’s lucid and lyrical prose." — The National (UAE)
"Angel of Oblivion is a continuous, plunging attempt to express the disorderly but urgent moment of daring to master the unmasterable. There is nothing so crass here as an ‘arc’ or a redemptive release. The reader is on the hook until the end – at which point the narrative’s underlying premises shimmer.” — Ron Slate, On the Seawall (blog)
"Impressive and moving" - Die Zeit
"A heart-wrenching story" - Peter Handke
"Haderlap writes in a clear yet poetic tone, in which time is a 'serene glacier' that crushes everything, all that the young protagonist at first finds wonderful and unchangeable, in its path." - Der Spiegel
"The strength of Haderlap's novel is that it stretches far back in time, in order to make the present recognisable." - Paul Jandl
"By telling her grandmother's story, the narrator finds her own, unmistakeable language, which speaks against the general urge to forget." - Deutschlandradio
It begins with vivid, if randomly recalled, memories of a childhood spent in the Carinthian countryside, near Austria’s border with the former Yugoslavia. Most importantly of all, though, Austrian poet Maja Haderlap opens her debut novel with the solid word referring to the defining presence in her life: “Grandmother.” This determined, ruined old woman emerges as an almost symbolic force. “Grandmother signals with her hand, she wants me to follow.” And follow is precisely what Haderlap’s narrator does. The only way she will ever begin to understand the history of her family, and also that of her culture, is by heeding Grandmother’s words, not merely her advice, but also her stories, dominated as they are by wartime experiences in Ravensbrück, the infamous concentration camp in northern Germany.
One of the earliest statements the narrator offers, if in an ironic context, shapes the entire book: “I, on the other hand, believe every word Grandmother says.” The reader will too, as the old woman bears the burden of survival. She is also the leader of the household and has little faith in her daughter-in-law, the narrator’s mother. The feelings are mutual.
Initially, it seems, much of the domestic tension may be the clash between Grandmother and the little girl’s hapless mother, a woman given to weeping who also possesses a liking for poetry. While Grandmother rules the house, investing everything she cooks with the pervasive scent of her dark, smoky kitchen, the daughter-in-law appears to know her place, which is working outside, doing the milking and tending animals. “She usually comes up to the kitchen window to look for me . . . and calls out . . . sometimes she just leaves without a word.” But there are other, far sadder reasons for the mother’s unhappiness.
These homely scenes detailing the daily chores are gentle and quite beautiful, with faint echoes of a Heaney poem. It is clear that the narrator’s religious-fanatic mother, a good worker, is faulted for not being from farming stock, so the narrator learns her lore from Grandmother. The old lady doesn’t spend much time praying, although she does attend Mass every year to give thanks for the end of the Nazi era, and come All Souls’ Day she places a loaf of bread and a pitcher of milk on the table for the dead. Her reasoning is more practical than spiritual: “So they’ll have something to eat when they come at night and will leave us in peace.”
Present day
It all seems to belong to a far distant time. But then mention is made of the poor reception the family receives of Slovenian television, and suddenly the story moves much closer to the present day. “The men walk around the perimeter of the house holding the antenna which looks like a bare Christmas tree, and we call out the window, ‘now!, now!’ . But the picture is no clearer. “We have no choice but to make do with the shadow television and to feel like pirates in the fog.”
The childhood being described belongs to the 1960s and 1970s. Maja Haderlap was born in August 1961 and grew up speaking two languages: Slovenian and compulsory German.
Angel of Oblivion, although presented as a novel, reads far more as an intelligent, heartfelt memoir recounted by a witness intent on finally telling an unknown story. The narrative is both personal and historic; thoughtful and hasty. The prose is uneven as the language, which is initially plain and factual, becomes increasingly lyrical, almost as if it is charting the narrator’s evolution as a writer. At times, it has a declamatory urgency. Elsewhere there are memorable anecdotes, such as the death of a beloved cow whose calf had been drowned at birth when the cow fell into a river. She is rescued only to subsequently die and be mourned.
There is a persistent sense of a struggle between the deliberate poise of a writer and the desperate human need to convey the communal pain felt by all, if the individual responses to it were varied. It is a fascinating book but the problems in the writing and use of the continuous present tense are less to do with the translation – although “The stallion’s perspiration” does jar – than with the original editing; the narrative reads as if written in a rush, which is at odds with its deliberate intent.
The material does outweigh the stylistic misgivings yet also compounds the feeling that it reads as a memoir, not a novel. If Haderlap appears overwhelmed by her story it is not surprising, as most readers will share this sensation.
Shadows run through the book. There is the shadow of history itself and that the narrator’s family as part of the Slovenian-speaking minority in Austria are also shadows. While Austria, which was annexed by Nazi Germany in 1938, fell into a victim role, the plight of its Slovenian-speaking population was to be forgotten or, at best, grouped in with the Yugoslav partisans. Initially a backdrop, the politics seeping through the pages becomes central to the shaping of the individual lives.
No matter how much her mother tries to become involved with the narrator in little ways, even hanging saccharine images of guardian angels over the child’s bed, Grandmother is ever present. She certainly dominates, and her experience in Ravensbrück, where most of the prisoners were women, is the heart of the book, particularly as she appears to make telling reference to her time there, almost in passing: “Early in 1945, more and more transports arrived in Ravensbrück. There was no more room in the barracks, the women had to sleep three or four to a bunk. Many women from Poland and Slovenia arrived, many city women from France, Belgium, Holland, good Lord, how those women fought for their dresses and furs, Grandmother says.”
Kindly influence
The narrator’s emotional mother inhabits a vague hell all her own. Trapped in an unhappy marriage, which she once claimed that the Virgin Mary had warned her against, she appears a more kindly influence than she is granted as it was her who wanted the narrator to receive a good education. The mother eventually turns to writing poetry and seems intent on salvaging her life.
But if Grandmother is a towering figure, the mangled existence of her son, the narrator’s father, also features as an ongoing family disaster. He is frequently drunk, often unbalanced and reeling from the various traumas he has undergone since being hung from a tree as a 12-year-old boy by Austrian police quizzing him about the whereabouts of his father. His threats of suicide punctuate the narrator’s childhood. He survives, for the narrator, as an adult and published poet, to haul him from taverns. Still, his chaotic misery does convince as wholly dreadful, utterly human.
Autobiographical novel or memoir or messy hybrid, Angel of Oblivion has so much information, as well as images which will linger, that its actual genre is almost irrelevant. When the narrator’s attention moves more to herself, it is less interesting. But she does mention standing on Republic Square in Ljubljana on June 26th, 1991, when the new Slovenian flag was raised for the first time.
German non-fiction writer Eugen Ruge turned his family’s history into a disciplined and convincing debut novel In Times of Fading Light (2011, translated by Anthea Bell, 2013). His methodology is more coherent than Haderlap’s; his voice more restrained. Yet stylistic misgivings aside, Angel of Oblivion, with its doomed and colourful cast of real-life characters, as well as multiple cruel twists of fate, is a devastating story, never less than wholeheartedly told.
Grandmother told the narrator not to make any noise. “Not so loud, she says, or you can’t hear anything.” Haderlap heeded her, heard a great deal and has shared it. - Eileen Battersby
The first-person narrative is told from the perspective of an unnamed girl, a girl who appears to be a close reflection of young Haderlap herself. Grandmother, Father, and Mother—relationships rather than names are emphasized here—play key supporting roles. Gradually, by slipping in details throughout the early chapters, Haderlap situates her story in the far south of Austria in the Province of Carinthia, bordering Italy and Yugoslavia (now present-day Slovenia). The girl and her family belong to the Slovene-speaking ethnic minority in the province. Since the founding of the First Austrian Republic in 1919, the Carinthian Slovenes have suffered prejudice and discrimination, and they were one of the non-Jewish groups sent to Nazi concentration camps during WWII.
Angel of Oblivion is part history lesson, part memoir, and part coming of age novel. As Haderlap mentioned in an interview a few years ago, this is “the forgotten story of the Slovene minority of Carinthia.” For most American readers, this book will fill a regrettable gap in their WWII knowledge. Far from a dry recitation of facts, though, Haderlap tells this history through the personal stories of her characters, many of which are based on real life events and family members.
The narrator is born into a community she describes as “confined by politics to history’s cellar, where they are besieged and poisoned by their own memories.” Indeed, almost all of the novel’s action takes place in the past, forming the basis of stories and memories. Grandmother survived a concentration camp, and Father joined the partisans, a resistance group that fought the Nazis on both sides of the Carinthia-Yugoslavia border. The most harrowing episodes in the novel involve these past experiences, and the girl’s childhood is spent steeped in her relatives’ recollections.
So pervasive is the past in this story that it takes on the force of an active character. The past menaces and knocks on doors and is dragged behind the girl “like a rickety wooden horse on wheels.” This is a past with violent intentions:
As I listen [to family stories], something collapses in my chest, as if a stack of logs were rolling away behind me, into the time before my time, and that time reaches out to grab me and I start to give in out of fascination and fear. It’s got hold of me, I think, now it’s here with me.
This sounds like something out of a horror story: A young girl pitted against a dark and evil force, her very survival hanging in the balance. This struggle and its outcome for the girl—i.e. Haderlap herself—is the focal point of the novel, which manages to be both exciting and suspenseful even though nothing much actually happens. The past fights against the future, the Slovenian language against the German, the traditional farming life against a more modern and educated city existence. I will not reveal the outcome of this epic battle here except to say that the language in which Haderlap chose to write her story is a good clue.
I cannot end this piece without also mentioning Haderlap’s lyrical prose and Tess Lewis’s gorgeous translation. Haderlap has written three books of poetry, and that gift for language helps to brighten and elevate this novel’s grim reality. This is a community decimated by the Nazi concentration camps and haunted by memories. Yet it is also a world where the girl and her mother “sit for hours in meadows of language and speak in the rhythm of rhymes” and where “the summer days have a glittering golden border and more of the color rubs off onto [the girl’s] skin every day.” Lewis’s translation preserves the poetry and honors the cadence of Haderlap’s prose.
If you need any more reasons to read this book, consider that it already won the prestigious Ingeborg Bachman Prize in Germany as well as the Prix du Premier Roman in France. For her translation, Tess Lewis won the Austrian Cultural Forum’s translation prize and the PEN Translation Prize. Add to that its place on this year’s long list for the Best Translated Book Award, and it is difficult to find another book as worthy of your close attention as Angel of Oblivion. - Gwen Dawson
http://www.rochester.edu/College/translation/threepercent/index.php?id=19142
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