by Eva Menasse, 2024
From the first paragraph, Eva Menasse presents a foreboding picture of a tangled, overgrown garden, hiding corruption and secrets, with shadows peering out of darkened windows. She describes it with wry irony and sharp wit. It’s an excellent introduction to her dark and tangled story.
The storyline jumps from place to place and from time to time, with multiple layers and multiple points of view. In spite of the helpful table of characters, a reader has to pay attention to keep track of how the characters fit into each others’ lives, although that gradually becomes clear as the novel progresses.
It tells the story of the town and many of its residents. A town on the periphery of the second world war and on the border with Hungary (which Darkenbloomers choose to call “Over There”), it’s become a backwater village from which young people leave and return only for family obligations. Some residents want modern economic development like centralized water works, but they are held back by those fearing what it might dig up. A winemaker moves forward with crafted quality wines, while his parents cling to their old customers who have ordered the same wine for decades because it is cheap. Characteristically, the acting mayor seeks guidance from his mentor who is lying comatose in a hospital in Vienna.
In many ways, the novel reminded me of Middlemarch, where George Eliot uses the residents of a small town to represent a changing wider world, both describing the action and commenting on it with a clever wit. But where Eliot comments on the scene with warmth, Menasse uses a dark tone to describe a far nastier scene. She visits many of the households in the town and notes the silences and deceptions that have deformed the relationships between people and within families. They all have secret resentments and histories that go back to childhood, or to past generations. To them, the danger is the contemporary characters who threaten to break through the façade that covers up the stories people don’t want to know. When a body is found in a field, the sense among the locals that “you don’t want to get involved in anything, not after all we’ve lived through, on the border.” Being on the border, keeping outsiders away and protecting themselves from danger, is at centre of their psyche.
The townspeople don’t know the whole truth (they don’t want to) and describe the unpleasant stories from the past as “rumour.” But the travel agent (naturally, the one who crosses borders) who is putting together a town history, finds the stories don’t line up. People leave out details that might put them in the wrong place, and say it wasn’t as bad as the rumours claim. The bad things were the fault of a few Nazi thugs – who sanitized their history and ran the town with the support of the Russian army after it overran their feeble defenses. When one former Nazi leader candidly describes his story, the locals say that you can’t take the old guy seriously. Some surviving victims of the violence don’t want to live with the pain that the past brings up.
The story takes some curious turns and ends on a lighter tone, when the old Nazi youth welcome refugees from Eastern Europe, perhaps as a joke against the modern state. When more of the story comes out, it feels like a weight has been removed, But the novel ends on an ambiguous note – an old farmer enters a church expecting quiet meditation, but little devilish voices around the Messiah chirp away saying this is not the end of the story.
This was a totally engrossing story, leaving me trying to understand the various characters and their perspectives on the town and its history. It examines a dark, painful history, but Menasse’s sharp commentary keeps it from feeling heavy, and the imperfect attempts of several characters to find the truth allow some light to break through. Menasse seems to be calling on Austria to stop hiding from its history and face up the need to repair the damage it has inflicted on contemporary society. Although drawn in a particular place, this lesson applies to many countries, including here in Canada with our colonialist past.
