Birgit Vanderbeke, The Mussel Feast, Trans. by Jamie Bulloch. Peirene Press, 2013.
The modern German classic that has shaped an entire generation.
A mother and her two teenage children sit at the dinner table. In the middle stands a large pot of cooked mussels. Why has the father not returned home? As the evening wears on, we glimpse the issues that are tearing this family apart.
‘I wrote this book in August 1989, just before the Fall of the Berlin Wall. I wanted to understand how revolutions start. It seemed logical to use the figure of a tyrannical father and turn the story into a German family saga.’ - Birgit Vanderbeke
"The book charts the collapse of the father's rule over his family during a single evening, as his wife, son and daughter sit at the dinner table tensely awaiting his arrival. (...) Das Muschelessen was her first book, and its depiction of the taut moment before a tyrant's fall fitted the 1990 zeitgeist perfectly. (...) Vanderbeke has transposed this revolution to the family dining room, and The Mussel Feast is arguably most damning as an indictment of the post-war West German family." - Jane Yager
People are divided about mussels. Some
of them love this salty taste of the ocean, enclosed in a hard shell.
The others are disgusted by the slimy mass. In Birgit Vanderbeke's
book, the marine mollusks trigger a real family tribunal.
Waiting for the despot
Mother, daughter and son wait for the
father to return home from a business trip. The father's much
anticipated promotion is supposed to be celebrated — it's the
climax of an ambitious career. On the table sits the head of the
family's favorite meal: a big bowl of mussels. He loves them, but the
others are disgusted by them and turn up their nose. But the father
doesn't show up.
"Shortly after seven Mum said, I
do hope nothing's happened; and out of pure spite I retorted, what if
it has, because all of a sudden my father was a spoilsport in my
eyes, or, to be more precise, a mood-wrecker. Suddenly I no longer
wanted him to come home. (...) Mum looked at me, not as horrified as
I'd expected, but with her head to one side, and then she smiled and
said, well, we'll see, and she didn't sound as if she'd find it
surprising or even terrible if he didn't come home."
An idyllic facade
A late vintage bottle of wine that has been chilling is opened up and with each sip, tongues loosen. The indictments of the absent father pile up on the table — his brutality, his despotic fusses, his orders that everyone is supposed to follow. He has tyrannized his family for years — he considered his son a wuss, his daughter too ugly, and his wife a top-notch cleaning lady. Frustration that has mounted for decades explodes. The whole idyllic setting was merely a facade.
"In truth we didn't see ourselves
as a proper family. Everything on our lives revolved around us having
to behave as if we were a proper family, as my father pictured a
family to be because he hadn't had one himself and so didn't know
what a proper family was."
Birgit Vanderbeke depicts the
deterioration of a family in slow motion. She uses no paragraphs,
hardly any periods or commas. The bitterness and disappointment over
the family tyrant slowly mounts, much like a wave that pulls down
everything in its wake.
It was precisely for this literary
furor that Birgit Vanderbeke received the renowned Ingeborg Bachmann
Prize. Her debut novel has also been her greatest success to date.
The swan song about middle-class
happiness ends with the ringing of the telephone. The mother does not
pick up. Instead, she throws away the mussels that have gone bad and
says to her son: "Would you please take out the trash?" - https://www.dw.com/en/birgit-vanderbeke-the-mussel-feast/a-44608477
mother and her two children – one boy, one girl – are waiting for the father to come home. She has prepared an enormous bowl of mussels for her husband; she doesn't care much for them herself, she says, but they're his favourite dish, and so she has spent ages scrubbing four kilos under the cold tap. But come six o'clock, the father's normal time of arrival, he has not come home; and, indeed, the family have a long wait ahead of them. As the backstory unfolds in its circuitous fashion – it is similar to Thomas Bernhard's technique, but without its density or rage – we learn more and more about the father, and we learn that we are being given a portrait of a tyrant.
Like all Peirene books, Venderbeke's is brief, in this case just breaking the 100-page barrier. I gather that its British publisher was surprised to find it had not already been translated, which shows a rather touching faith in this nation's curiosity about European fiction. But you may wonder why it is a set text in Germany. Something funny is going on here, but what?"Although I found the mussels creepy" – the book is narrated by the elder daughter – "I went over, as I didn't want to be cowardly; and they looked revolting, lying there, some opening slowly, fairly slowly, and then the entire heap of them started to move with this rattling sound. Unbelievable, I said, how revolting these creatures are, gasping as instead of seawater they get air, which they can't breathe, and they're also being scalded in the boiling water, and then they all open, which means they're dead."
I was reminded of another scene where a German is revolted by seafood: the eels in Gunter Grass's The Tin Drum. The daughter recalls much nausea from her childhood: continually puking up her formula as a baby, puking up in the car when her father was driving. There is an undercurrent of revulsion beneath the otherwise placid exterior of the postwar German family. This family, though, like Vanderbeke's, originally came from the GDR; and many see the book as a deep criticism of – take your pick – either the stifling, unimaginative conformity of the west, or the tyranny, and indeed stifling, etc etc of the East. A teasing author's quote on the back jacket reads: "I wrote this book in August 1989, just before the fall of the Berlin Wall. I wanted to understand how revolutions start. It seemed logical to use the figure of a tyrannical father and turn the story into a German family saga."
While it's good to know that there is a reason why the needle on your metaphor-detector is trembling, it's also good to know that – unlike, say, Animal Farm – the book is not all metaphor, with everything in it capable of being neatly paired off with its real-life counterpart. The word that alerted me was "logical", which is itself a quality the scientifically minded father prizes highly. It may be that this is a portrait of the hysteria behind the calm, progressively technocratic Wirtschaftswunder [economic miracle] (as the father reminds his children many times, playing the piano and reading books don't get engines started); but there is real, felt horror at what we gradually learn is the monstrous, deranged behaviour of the father. Both the children, it turns out, have wondered how many bones they would break if they jumped from their first-floor balcony; but the windows are locked, so the neighbours won't hear the sound of the father's fury. (Pretty much everything drives him round the bend.) The mother, in turn, fantasises about Medea, and when her admission comes it is almost as terrifying as Medea's actual crime.
This is one of those books that doesn't tell us what to think, but sets us off thinking, which really is the way to do it. (That it was Vanderbeke's first published work I find remarkable.) And if this is, as has been claimed, a look into the German psyche, then perhaps we wouldn't see that nation in the chippy or resentful way we sometimes now do. Who writes this kind of nuanced work in Britain? - Nicholas Lezard
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2013/feb/12/mussel-feast-birgit-vanderbeke-review
Peirene publish distinctive European literary fiction in translation, by authors who are award-winners or best-sellers in their countries of origin. Birgit Vanderbeke is no exception. Her debut novel The Mussel Feast, originally published in 1990, won the Ingeborg Bachmann Prize and is on the school curriculum in Germany. She wrote it just before the fall of the Berlin Wall, so it is the perfect opening title in Peirene's "Revolutionary Moments" series.
The Mussel Feast is narrated by a nameless teenage girl. Together with her mother and younger brother, she awaits the return of her father. Her mother has prepared a huge pot of mussels because they are her husband's favourite meal. The narrator ponders the cruelty involved in boiling the mussels alive and how they make a peculiar sound as they cook "which made me feel creepy … and the hair on my arms stood on end".
There are various references to the family's exodus from East to West Germany, and some amusing anecdotes that illustrate the father's newly acquired snobbery and pettiness. Coming from an impoverished background, he is obsessed with status. Despising "the smell of poor people", he likes to splash out on sharp suits, drives a fast car, and tips generously. However, he derides his wife, who worries about getting into debt and buys only bargain clothes for herself and her children.
There is a political edge to Vanderbeke's provocative examination of patriarchal violence, and part of the power of this darkly comic tale is how well it succeeds as an allegory for political tyranny. The father's tactics for exerting control in the familial home are similar to those an authoritarian regime exercises to keep the people cowed. His frequent interrogations and brutal punishments have instilled fear and paranoia. The family are provided for, but denied the opportunity to make their own choices; and creativity is suppressed: the daughter's daily piano practice is restricted to an hour and her mother's violin lies broken in a wardrobe because the father deems music "pure excess".
When the mother finally takes a stand, her act of feminist self-assertion is as revolutionary as Nora's slamming of the door in Ibsen's 1879 play The Doll's House. It makes you wonder, how far have we really come? Given the current obsession with traditional family values, Jamie Bulloch's flawless translation is timely. The Mussel Feast will make uncomfortable reading for those who aspire to the ideal of the perfect nuclear family. - Lucy Popescu
www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/books/reviews/review-the-mussel-feast-by-birgit-vanderbeke-trs-jamie-bulloch-8488426.html
Dysfunctional families have always got it going in literature. I have always loved families that are bad, slightly not okay in the head and always not prone to doing the right things. Relationships play a vital role in any book. I think that is the base of a plot, well more or less so. So this time when I finished a book on relationships and family, I began thinking of the eccentric ways of my family and how do we behave in situations as a unit or rather when thrown into situations just as the family is in this book.
A mother and her two teenage children are sitting around the dinner table, waiting for their father to make an appearance. The feast is ready – the mussel feast – for their father’s promotion. The father is delayed. As the night turns on, the wait extends itself. The father is late and the family’s secrets and dirty laundry is out to the readers. That in short, is the plot of the story, and it cannot end here. There is more – the family has moved to West Germany, escaping the East, just before the fall of the Berlin Wall. This is almost representative of the controlling attitude of the father and the way the entire family is affected by his behaviour.
What I loved about this book is the way it is written but of course. The sentences almost merge into one another and sometimes the transition between the past and the present is too quick and yet as a reader I did not feel lost or disconnected at any point. In fact, at most times while reading the book I wished it were longer than one hundred and twelve pages. Birgit’s book was a rage in Germany when published – almost became a classic and I could see why. The writing is funny and dark at the same time, which is something I haven’t read in a while, so the read was refreshing and contemplative. One more thing that struck me and I again connect to the political angle of the book is that the characters are nameless, almost again reflective of the state of the household and the country.
The characters were outlined superbly throughout the book and what hit the most was the surprise element at the end and how each character comes to their own. The book is narrated by the daughter and yet all of them get their due. I would have however loved to also read the story from the others’ perspective, more so from the “missing” father’s point of view. He is not present and yet looms large, almost like Godot. I cannot end the review without mentioning the fantastic effort of the translator Jamie Bulloch, who also translated Portrait of the Mother as a Young Woman and flawlessly so. The Mussel Feast is an engaging read, which will make you think long after you have finished reading the book. A gem of a read which should not be missed. - thehungryreader.wordpress.com/2013/02/28/book-review-the-mussel-feast-by-birgit-vanderbeke/
The Mussel Feast is narrated by a young woman -- past the age of majority but apparently still living at home -- who describes how she and her younger brother annd their mother wait for the pater familias to come home for dinner -- a heap of moules-frites (mussels (four kilos worth) and french fries) mom has prepared. Dad is returning from a business trip, and the expectation is that he will come back with very good news, that he'll be getting a promotion, the culmination of his career. It's apparent from the first, however, that the familial level of excitement is not high. Mom isn't particularly enthusiastic about mussels, for one thing, but she takes it on herself to scrub and cook the damn things. But there's a lot more to it, too. Dad is clearly kind of a tyrant, and his family harbors no great love for the domineering, absent man. As the wait continues -- and they wait for quite a while -- the girl fills in some of the blanks about the family, and her father in particular. The picture keeps getting darker and darker, and while there's little joy at the dinner table there also seems some palpable relief that he hasn't come yet to take his place. Indeed, it seems they wouldn't really mind if he never came back .....
From the first, we know things didn't go entirely as planned: in the novel's opening lines the narrator speaks of the "abortive feast" (in German: "ausgefallene Muschelessen", whereby 'ausgefallen' also means 'unusual'); more importantly, she also reveals that: "what came in the wake of our abortive feast was so monumental that none of us have got over it yet". (In the German what happened is said to be: "von solcher Ungeheuerlichkeit", meaning and more suggestive of something darker and more sinister, 'monstrosity' or 'outrageousness' rather than mere 'monumentality'.) So its clear this isn't going to be some happy family get-together at the dining room table (and that no one is going to enjoy the damn mussels).
The story is presented in strings of run-on sentences, with extremely few paragraph breaks; the English translation breaks this down -- the first sentence become three in English, the second four, etc. The obvious comparison for this droning, repetitive style and slowly-peeling-back-the-ugly-intimate-layers is Thomas Bernhard, and Vanderbeke manages quite well in creating the same sort of tension Bernhard does. She also has as her subject a group of characters and a family dynamic as messed-up as in many of Bernhard's works.
It becomes clear that dad has some very specific ideas and ideals about family and family life -- and that he is very much in charge of all of it. His family has been a series of disappointments to him -- the daughter was so hairy at birth that he's never gotten over his disgust, the son is too soft and unathletic. Whatever they do, they can't please him, because they can't do it just right or don't meet his (insane) expectations. Smart and handsome, the father treats his family like a burden -- though he proves himself to be a full-of-himself fool, too, repeatedly losing the family's savings by investing in stocks of Japanese companies (that soon thereafter go bankrupt), for example.
The more brutish side of the father comes to light slowly, too, and the household is revealed as one of both horrible psychological and physical bullying. The father is an imposing father-figure, but the human cost on those who suffer under him is devastating.
The wait, with the mussels getting colder, and the way things work out proves to be cathartic. It's no surprise: after all, the narrator already revealed right at the start that: "what came in the wake of our abortive feast was so monumental that none of us have got over it yet" -- but The Mussel Feast reveals nothing of that wake, leading up only to the point of release.
There's considerable strength to the narrative, and the picture of the father that slowly emerges is appealingly horrible. Unfortunately, the other characters -- including the narrator -- are less well-drawn and remain somewhat shadowy figures, which saps some of the overall effect.
In the German The Mussel Feast is presented as an 'Erzählung' -- simply a story, rather tnan a novel or novella -- and it feels like a text that is more an exercise in telling than a full-fledged novel. The basic story is, indeed, very simple, and though fleshed-out, with so much of the family history filled in, it is more character-study and turning-point than anything else -- a drawn-out short story (though not painfully or artificially so).
It is also hard not read a bit of state/German allegory into this work, written as East Germany collapsed, by an author born in the East who moved with her family to the West when she was a child -- just like the family in the story ..... Fortunately, Vanderbeke is not too obvious in her patriarchal state critique, preferring the more straightforward purely patriarchal critique, and taking whatever else comes with it .....
In any case, all in all, The Mussel Feast is quite effective.
[Note: This review is based on the German original; I have not seen the translation (beyond this brief reading sample) but it is a challenging text to render into English, beginning with what to do with the run-on sentences. Indeed, the title already proves to be quite a challenge too. 'Muschelessen' is not quite a 'mussel feast' -- more a 'meal of musssels', the use of 'essen' also suggesting the activity (eating); while it is a special meal, 'feast' perhaps implies and suggests too much. There's obviously also some heavy-handed symbolism with the suggestive mussels front and center, and this too is accentuated in the German: 'Muschi' is one of the delightful (and by far the softest) German words for the relevant part of the female anatomy (even the nearest English equivalent, 'pussy', is much sharper- and harsher-sounding), and it's unfortunate that while the German title inevitably reminds of that, the necessary English one instead echoes something entirely different, flexing muscles instead.) - M.A.Orthofer
www.complete-review.com/reviews/moddeut/vanderbeke.htm
A mother and her two teenage children are preparing a feast of mussels, their customary meal for celebrations. The daughter doesn’t much care for mussels, nor does the mother, but this is what they do. They must act like a proper family. But the father doesn’t come home when expected and the truths of their proper family come out.
The Mussel Feast is narrated by the daughter and starts off with the actions of preparing and cooking the mussels. There is a fantastic passage where the mussels start to scream and she contemplates them being cooked alive. When the father doesn’t return, her thoughts start to wander and the novella is a slow reveal of their lives. A normal family on the outside but living under a controlling father; one obsessed with being proper. When alone the family can act how they like but as soon as he is present, they put on their masks.
The Mussel Feast is one of the most studied texts in Germany. Written just before the fall of the Berlin Wall, it shows a family that have escaped the East, trading one form of control for another. Birgit Vanderbeke wrote it to explore how revolutions start, how one thought can snowball into realisation and defiance. There are quite a lot of run-on sentences and paragraphs that run into pages, which reflects the daughter’s train of thought. It’s a short yet completely absorbing read.
This is the first of Peirene’s three titles for 2013 in their Turning Point: Revolutionary Moments series, with Mr Darwin’s Gardener by Kristina Carlson and Chasing the King of Hearts by Hanna Krall still to come. I love the sound of all of these and if you do to, the best way to support Peirene Press is via subscription. This edition has been translated into English by Jamie Bulloch and is currently available in paperback. Thanks go to the publisher for providing a copy for review. - Ellie
www.curiositykilledthebookworm.net/2013/02/the-mussel-feast.html
It is perhaps the fact that Peirene Press deliberately select novellas, stories which encourage, if not demand, an uninterrupted reading, which allows them to forsake cheap gimmicks such as page-turning plots and immediately sympathetic characters in their choice of texts. Instead we are given something to immerse ourselves in, something where mood can be as important as action, and where the ordinary can slowly grow into the extraordinary. Their latest publication, The Mussel Feast by German writer Birgit Vanderbeke (yet another author brought into English for the first time, on this occasion at the hands of Jamie Bulloch) is no exception.
Its very title is the antithesis of thriller, and although the mussel feast is to some extent symbolic, the mussels are very real, opening the novel and only vanishing at its conclusion, “the shells rattling” as they are emptied into the dustbin. The story begins with a mother and her two teenage children preparing for their father’s return. Their father has gained promotion at work and the mussels are part of a celebratory meal:
“We would always have mussels to celebrate a special occasion, and this was a special occasion, though in a very different way from what we’d had in mind.”As the family await the father’s return, we learn more about him and the influence he has on the rest of the family:
“…when my father was on business trips the thee of us told each other the most fanciful stories… Before my father came home, however, all these fanciful ideas vanished, especially my mother’s…switching to wifey mode when he came home.”The father seems something of a tyrannical figure, imposing his values on the rest of the family, and the novella can be read as an allegory of East Germany before the wall fell, or as a critique of patriarchy. The father, we learn, has had to work his way up from poverty, whereas the mother is a teacher. The children are prevented from any activity they enjoy – for example the narrator can only practise her piano playing when the father is absent – and are frequently told how they disappoint him. He is not beyond punishing them physically:
“…he tried to use violence to knock the stubbornness out of me, just as he tried to use violence to knock the wimpishness out of my brother.”It is the father’s non-appearance when he is expected that allows the family to experience a sense of freedom. The longer they wait for him the more they resent the effect he will have on them when he walks through the door. Vanderbeke’s ending emphasises, not the fate of the father, but the family’s will to resist him. If a novel is a banquet and a short story is a snack, The Mussel Feast is the perfect meal. - https://1streading.wordpress.com/2013/02/20/the-mussel-feast/
In a Berlin apartment, a woman scrubs four kilos of mussels and places them in a heavy pot to cook as she and her two teenagers wait for the father to return. The meal is his favourite, and she has prepared it to celebrate his expected promotion. Written in 1989 as East Germany's communist dictatorship was unravelling, Birgit Vanderbeke's novella was first published the following year. Capturing the national mood, it won the Ingeborg Bachmann Prize, and is now a school text.
The action spans four hours, and is told from the perspective of the daughter whose freewheeling stream of consciousness is admirably captured by Jamie Bulloch's fine translation. It is she who sounds the first note of dissent, expressing revulsion at the sound of the molluscs opening in the boiling water as the black, glistening heap rises over the rim of the pan.
The Mussel Feast is both a coming-of-age novel set in Germany, and a coming-of-age novel for Germany. The father has brought with him the authoritarian paternalism of the state he fled, turning his family into a mini-surveillance society. Sinister, funny and heartening, this taut novella reflects, within the microcosm of the family, the dissolution of the East German state, with an insight, economy and controlled fury that have made it a modern German classic. - CJ Schuler
www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/books/reviews/the-mussel-feast-by-birgit-vanderbeke-peirene-press-10-8550569.html
Pardon my ignorance here, but how can a “modern German classic” one that “won the most prestigious German-language literature award, the Ingeborg Bachmann Prize”, that was first published in 1990 and “has not been out of print since”, one that has “been translated into all major European languages”, take 23 years before somebody picks it up, translates it into English and releases it in Britain? What is going on here? Surely such honoured works don’t just slip into oblivion for English readers? It does make you think, “How many untranslated masterpieces are sitting out there?” I could go into the merits of the Best Translated Book Award that doesn’t restrict their winner to being “alive” but may be another time. I should simply thank the independent publisher Peirene Press for bringing this work to life in English. www.peirenepress.com
The 2014 Independent Foreign Fiction Prize features a number of short works and “The Mussel Feast” is yet another. Weighing in at 105 pages and 13 paragraphs (yes that is not a typo the book has thirteen paragraphs) it is a work that you feel you could knock over simply in one sitting.
Our story starts with our young (teenage?) narrator, via a monologue, explaining the process of cleaning mussels, because they’re having a feast, a celebration for their father as he’s about to return from a business trip. “We would always have mussels to celebrate a special occasion” but her and her mother don’t “care for them much”. On the surface a simple feast preparation for a normal family (there is a brother) about to celebrate the father’s potential promotion and his home-coming. Just like a mussel, strong, solid, shiny on the outside, resilient.
But soon our monologue reveals the true darkness of the family, the mussels begin to open. We are slowly led into the bleak world of a “normal family” that has moved from the East and settled in West Berlin. Even the pot that contains the mussel feast has a tale. As our night unfolds, and the ritual hour of the home-coming passes and hours tick away we slowly peel back the layers of this “proper family”:
We no longer liked being a proper family, as he called it. In truth we didn’t see ourselves as a proper family. Everything in our lives revolved around us having to behave as if we were a proper family, as my father pictured a family to be because he hadn’t had one himself and so didn’t know what a proper family was, although he’d developed the most detailed notions of what one was like; and while he sat in his office we played at being this, even though we’d far rather have let our hair down than be a proper family.
As the monologue continues we are drawn further into the horrors of this family unit, the omnipotent father has still not arrived but their uncomfortableness of him being all knowing, all seeing restricts their openness. As the hours tick by the special Spatlese starts to take effect and the revelations speed up, the honesty also opens up and the horrors become more revealing. Time seems to speed up too. The fully open mussels are now there for all to see, in all their resplendent colour, but because of the time, they’re ruined.
This is a moving and bleak tale of emotional and domestic violence, of manipulation and creation, a story where I had to double take and think…“have I ever said anything like that”? Dad’s come home from a long hard day, he just needs a bit of a rest…..
My father talked to my mother about his week at the office, whereas my mother didn’t talk to my father about her week at school, because the office was important and worth more than school.
The impressions that parents behaviour, actions and words makes on young children is all to the fore here, simple acts like discussing the next holiday are shown to be power struggles and with a domineering father in charge there is only going to be one outcome.
I don’t want to reveal too much of the family interactions and the opening up as the hours tick by and there is no father at the feast, I want to leave that startling unravelling to you as a potential reader. But I dare you to not be moved by the innocence, the acceptance of abnormal behaviour, and the reluctance to address it.
A book written just before the fall of the Berlin Wall, it shows the relentless ambition of the Eastern bloc settlers, their shame of their past, their need to create a “proper family”, what it means to keep up appearances at all costs, the relentless pursuit of promotion and the emotional and physical neglect that comes as baggage. A very moving book indeed.
Another amazing work that’s appeared on the 2014 Independent Foreign Fiction Prize long list (and now on both the Shadow Jury and the official shortlist) this is a book that every parent should read, even if it makes you simply think about the impact your day to day interactions with each other has on the children.
http://messybooker.blogspot.com/2014/04/independent-foreign-fiction-prize-2014_6720.htmlKevinfromCanada
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Birgit Vanderbeke, You Would Have Missed Me, Trans. by Jamie Bulloch, Peirene Press Ltd, 2019.
A family is torn apart by their dream of a better future in the West. A true story narrated through the eyes of a child. West Germany, early 1960s: A little girl arrives with her parents from East Germany in a camp for displaced people. The girl's father is abusive, the mother ignores her. Soon she will celebrate her seventh birthday and all she wants is a cat. Instead she receives an illuminated globe. The girl can't hide her disappointment - but then she discovers that the globe offers her a way to escape the misery of the camp.
‘I can’t remember what it was like being born, but from what they used to tell me it seemed almost as if everything had been fine up to that point.’
Standing in her family’s two-bedroom flat in the Promised Land, a little girl realizes that once again she won’t be getting a cat for her birthday. She’s been wanting one ever since she was five – all the way back to when they were living in the refugee camp. In the East, her Grandma made cakes and kept rabbits; now there is no baking, no pets and certainly no Grandma. West Germany in the early 1960s is a difficult place for a seven-year-old East German refugee, particularly when no one will listen to you.
Birgit Vanderbeke’s The Mussel Feast, from 2013, remains one of my favourite Peirene publications – it is, in fact, the Peirene novel I most frequently recommend to others. Peirene policy, however, has largely focused on bringing authors who have not been translated before to an English-reading audience, and therefore to publish only one work from each author. 2019 sees this ‘rule’ broken as Jamie Bulloch offers us a second Vanderbeke novella, You Would Have Missed Me, originally published in 2016. It, too, centres on a family with a powerful male figure at the centre, and is similarly narrated by a child, a seven-year-old daughter isolated not only by the absence of siblings, but by her fractured relationship with her mother.
As with The Mussel Feast, You Would Have Missed Me has a conceit in which the story takes place during one particular day, in this case the narrator’s seventh birthday. It begins as she waits for her birthday gifts, accepting once again that she will not get the kitten she desires:
“You get used to disappointments, but in the long term they make you feel cold and empty inside.”The birthday song, begun on page 34, is not completed until page 78. In the meantime, her thoughts range across her brief life so far, the family’s escape from East Germany to the West and their time in a refugee camp. Her mother, it is revealed, comes from a wealthy family, but one that sympathised with the Nazis, as (her husband points out) did that of her fiancé, who was killed during the war:
“…everything his family owned would have been expropriated after the war, and then life wouldn’t have been quite so rosy, even if they hadn’t been Nazis, but because they were Nazis, like all land-owners and fat cats, I don’t suppose they would have had much to laugh about under the Russians.”Her husband, Osch (though I’m not certain this is his name – we’re told more than once he doesn’t like it – or simply a Flemish sigh) feels exempt from Germany’s loss (“May I also point out that you lost the war?”) as he arrived in Germany as a child from Belgium:
“My father was a foreigner because his mother had brought him to Germany from Belgium when he was very small and the war had already begun.”The war, and her fiancé’s death, ends the mother’s first dream, but the West, the “Promised Land” as the narrator calls it, becomes her second. In a novel which opens with the narrator’s disappointment of not receiving her dream present, the disappointment of adults is also to the fore. This is perhaps best exemplified in the teak furniture that was her mother’s first acquisition in the West:
“Before we came to the West my mother had always dreamed of teak furniture, but of course she didn’t know you had to polish teak all the time because she’d only ever dreamed of it and had never owned any.”The marriage and move to the West was, in itself, a dream of her mother’s:
“The moment a dream of a husband and child and another life had been planted inside my mother’s head, long after her landowner fiancé was out of the picture and she could have let the matter rest – at that moment everything stared to get complicated an descend into chaos.”Osch’s dreams are different, harking back to his “East German student life with the Western cinemas and girlfriends”:
“As far as my father was concerned there was nothing promising about this land.”As for the narrator, “I wasn’t exactly the child they’d dreamed of,” disappointment being the corollary of dreaming:
“Dreaming, however, was absolutely fine in the Promised Land. The wonderful thing about this country was that as soon as my mother had acquired the teak furniture… and was disappointed because they weren’t exactly what she had been dreaming of, she could immediately start dreaming of larch furniture…”Initially the mother’s lack of affection, and attempts to isolate the narrator with prohibitions of who she can associate with, seems to be the greatest hurt the child suffers, but we slowly become aware of the threat of the father. A visit to a doctor reveals “a few broken bones that hadn’t fused back together very well” which the mother denies any knowledge of, and frequent references to the father’s hands (often clenched in his pockets in anger) prove to be prophetic.
But, just as with The Mussel Feast, the novel offers hope when the narrator frees herself from the present with the aid of a globe she receives as a birthday present (along with a prescient copy of The Time Machine):
“I’d done it. At the ripe time, I’d shot myself into the future…”From there the narrator literally discovers her own voice:
“Ever since I’d heard my voice, I’d been saying things I’d never have dared say before.”You Would Have Missed Me is another complex, provoking fable from Vanderbeke, exploring numerous themes – the twisted relationship of an abusive marriage, the attractions and disappointments of a consumer economy, the shifting status of the refugee, the power of the imagination – through the eyes, and voice, of a child. It, too, now belongs among my favourite Peirene publications. - https://1streading.wordpress.com/2019/05/12/you-would-have-missed-me/
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