A sea, a fucking ocean of unspoken words

IT has always amazed me how at any given time certain themes unfold in your reading, unplanned, by chance. After reading The Silence in Between about the divisions and brokenness caused by the Berlin Wall, Bernhard Schlink's The Granddaughter lands on my table: also about Berlin in those days. My eyes are opened to further nuances.

Schlink is, of course, a master story weaver. This is evidenced by his runaway success The Reader, which was a bestseller in both Germany and the US and has been translated into 39 languages. It was the first German book to achieve a number one position on The New York Times bestseller list. It won many prizes and was also filmed. And then last year he wrote this gripping novel.

I'll tell you about it, and about another novel that took my breath away.

Kaspar is a good, sober-minded man, a bookstore owner. He met his wife Birgit on an outreach exercise for the East and West German youth and helped her cross over to the West. However, there were dark secrets in her East German past he knew nothing about. She later began drinking excessively and sank into depression and apathy. Kaspar worked all day, came home and cooked for her, picked her up from the sofa or carpet where she had passed out, and carried her to bed. One night, he finds her in the bathtub, underwater. She has imbibed sleeping pills and alcohol and it is unclear whether it was suicide or an accident. There is no letter.

Eventually, he musters up the courage to check her computer: She was writing a novel. What he reads there makes his world implode. She was pregnant when he met her and gave birth in secret and arranged for the child to be given away before coming to West Germany. She wanted to go back again to look for the child, but didn't have the courage.

Kaspar takes it upon himself to track down the child, now a middle-aged woman, and offer himself to her as a stepfather and for any help she may need.

His detective work reveals that she grew up with her biological father: The friend who was supposed to have left the baby on the doorstep of a personage couldn't do it. The father was older than Birgit and married. He was in a position of power and had abused her. He and his wife were overly strict and Birgit's abandoned child rebelled. She became a skinhead who beat up foreigners and gays on the street with bottles, and burnt cars. She was addicted to drugs. She was “saved" by a charismatic far-right zealot who offered skinheads and neo-Nazis jobs on a farm, a kind of nation-state collective. She and the zealot had a daughter, Sigrun.

Kaspar introduces himself and is coldly received. He devises the plan to inform them that his late wife had left money for her child and grandchild, which he had to pay in instalments, on the condition that Sigrun spends a few weeks with him every year. Her father, the cult leader, was greedy for the money. She was allowed to visit Kaspar provided he didn't try to change her.

The way the cautious friendship unfolds between an indoctrinated teenager and her enlightened, thoughtful step-grandfather is particularly striking. Sigrun believes the Holocaust never took place and Anne Frank's diary was forged. She believes Germany is for Germans and Muslims and foreigners have to be deported. He doesn't confront her; he leaves scattered reading material for her that makes her think. And he makes her fall in love with the piano.

It's a lovely, lovely book. Read it.

The Granddaughter by Bernhard Schlink is published by Weidenfeld & Nicholson and costs R440 at Amazon SA.

Another book that jumps nimbly between the past and present is Adrienne Young's A Sea of Unspoken Things. James Golden is a 37-year-old woman. Her twin brother, Johnny, was recently killed in a hunting accident. She had no longer been close to him and knew little about his life over the past two decades. Once they had been inseparable and she could feel his emotions and sensations in her own body. When he was shot dead, she felt the impact of the bullet under her breastbone from far away, heard a woman's voice say his name, and saw the treetops and sky of his last view.

She had to look out for Johnny from their childhood and protect him from himself. Sometimes he frightened her. He was unpredictable, unfathomable, and impulsive. Rules and boundaries didn't exist for him. At 17 she left the forest town where they grew up, went to art school and settled in San Francisco as an artist.

Intrigues and mysteries

Now she is confronted with the past and is aware of Johnny's presence everywhere, in the mountain hut where they grew up with their father, in his darkroom, in the dense forest. She sees her childhood sweetheart again, Micah, Johnny's bosom friend who too was out to protect him from himself. “We could fill the fucking ocean with the things we never said to each other," are Micah's words to her. And she thinks:

That pinch behind my ribs twisted tighter. There was more behind that statement than I wanted to absorb, because it was unbearably true. Now that ocean was so deep and wide that I couldn't even begin to make sense of it.

All sorts of intrigues and mysteries tumble out of the closet and she is increasingly convinced that Johnny's death was no accident. What had he been up to?

The electricity between her and Micah is still there, but can he forgive her for forsaking him all those years ago, and will she ever be able to settle back in her hometown?

The novel is atmospheric, exciting and intriguing.

A Sea of Unspoken Things by Adrienne Young is published by Delacorte Press and costs R884 at Amazon SA.

What are we listening to?

Fausto Papetti plays “The Windmills of your Mind":

♦ VWB ♦

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