What a beguiling read about family and dislocation, both physical and psychological. Thomas Grattan begins his novel with a bewildering defection that befalls a young girl prior to the collapse of Communism and suddenly shifts to the perspective of Beate's children, who call her "the German lady," growing up in small-town America two decades in the future. Michael and Adela, in turn, experience the trauma of being uprooted when Beate, bereft after her husband's abrupt departure for California, inherits the large home in East Germany that her parents had been forced to leave behind.
But it was the city’s emptiness that Michael now loved, streets he could walk down without a single car parked on them, houses as breathless as graves; the clerks at this or that store who greeted him with an overeager hello, this city a shelter dog ready to roll over and follow you forever if you approached with a soft voice and gentle hand.
Michael, more adaptable than his younger sister, has an easier adjustment to life in Deutschland, perhaps because his homosexuality conditioned him not to feel at home anywhere.
This city tugged self sufficiency out of Michael, like a magician pulling an endless scarf from his mouth.
Adela, on the other hand, rebels against an ingrained German insularity by bringing food to immigrants, a kindness predicated on a moral superiority Michael doesn't share. This eventually produces a family rupture that causes her to flee back to her father in California.
Beate felt hurt, then chastened by the violence in front of them that her daughter had seen coming with the inevitable result of a recipe.
It takes a third generation for the family's trauma to dissipate. By then, it's impossible not to love each of Grattan's perfectly realized characters whose individual stories emerge slowly, and in fragments, profoundly shaped by their German blood.
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