August 31, 2015
Fritz’s slim first novel takes place in Germany, loosely from 1943 to 1963. The narrative follows the story of Bertha, a young woman who gets pregnant by a German music teacher named Rudolph, who quickly dies in the Second World War, leaving Wilhelm, his best friend, to marry Berta. Berta’s unhappiness grows as she gives birth to a baby named Rudolph and later, another named Bertha; neither child bears much wit or will to survive. The narrative is slippery, never reliable or predictable, lyrical in one moment and transforming into dry domestic satire in the next. Time shifts frequently as well, and though the novel begins after Berta has acted drastically and Wilhelm is preparing to marry her best friend, it lopes back and forth in time at a dizzying pace, mirroring Berta’s own feverish mind. This makes for a difficult (though innovative) reading experience—there is little to anchor the reader in what descends into a spooling riff on despair, making the story more puzzle than legible timeline, and requiring patience. Still, the prose is rewarding when it occasionally slips temporarily out of Fritz’s stark lack of sentiment and into quiet meditations on the self, as when Fritz writes of Berta that “the inwardness she had struggled for, tirelessly and to no purpose, now suffused her face, and it would never leave her thereafter.” That inwardness of the mind shifts cleverly in a way that makes it not an easy read, but surely an important one.
August 1, 2015
In the first novel available in English by the late Austrian writer Fritz (1948-2007), a woman faces her dark past when friends visit her in a mental hospital.Set in Austria between 1945 and 1963, this poison cocktail of a novel swirls together painful personal histories and desperate hidden lives. A chauffeur named Wilhelm returns from the war to the city of Donaublau to marry Berta, keeping a promise made to a friend killed in battle. Berta's friend Wilhelmine, a cleaning woman, eyes his arrival with suspicion and jealousy. Early on the novel reads like farce as the narrative clomps around in time; the misdirection doesn't generate much mystery but pays dividends as events unfold. Things pick up when the action skips ahead 15 years to the day Wilhelm and Wilhelmine, now unhappily married, debate the best time to "pay Berta a visit and cheer her up" in the mental hospital. Fritz layers in much beauty and tragedy to show how Berta's life was undone by grief, rancor from Wilhelmine, parenting two difficult kids, and "yearning for an ideal." Fritz puts on a stylistic show, the prose dancing in West's translation from camp to romance to psychological horror amid name games and wild monologues that often hide the truth. The title is Berta's name for the evil in the world that will crush innocence out of her children. The climax is a moral challenge to readers: the book's most sympathetic character commits its most horrific act. In a caged hospital ward, Berta is befriended by a woman called Wise Little Mother, who intones bons mots like, "life is hope and hope is a wound," with a logic as beguiling and twisted as that motivating the sane in the outside world.At times unwieldy but a harrowing book about the horrors of motherhood, jealousy, and war trauma.
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