WRITERS: DOCK!

KLATSAND, FORMERLY FISH CREEK, IN OREGON is a tiny settlement that grows over four generations to become an off-the-beaten-track and less than fashionable coastal resort town. It lies on the Pacific coast of Oregon and is only separated from that mighty body of water by the Searoad of the title. In one poem, ten short stories and one longer assemblage of diary entries from the ladies of three generations of one local family, and occasional interjections from a fourth generation, we are introduced to a variety of residents and passing personnel who interact with their surroundings. In sharing the lives of these people we are enabled to see some of the pivotal events of the twentieth century on those whose lives are lived outside of the mainstream of American Society.

There are two factors, for me, that make this a hugely enjoyable but quite difficult book to read. Firstly, the language is so beautiful in its own right that it is very difficult to concentrate on the content of the stories rather than the words themselves. This is one book that should definitely be read, and loved, as a paper copy rather than an electronic one. Every word carries the feeling that it has been deliberated over at length, and chosen then placed with surgical precision. The language of all the stories and diary entries verges on the poetic and flows with the same effortless motion as the Pacific Ocean, which borders one side of the Searoad.

The second factor is the time sequencing of the narratives. Following on from the introductory poem, there are ten short stories that form what may be considered as part one of the book. They each focus on the occupants of one of the establishments in the settlement of Klatsand, and each fits into its own era, but the sequence is not a linear time-line. All these stories were originally published as stand-alone shorts in a variety of American journalistic publications, which means that each is a totally self-contained unit in one sense, but when they are all put together, as they are here, then the connections begin to emerge.

The final story is titled simply Hernes, and is written in the style of diary entries from four ladies of Klatsand. This is not recorded as having been published separately anywhere else, which gives rise to the feeling that it was written to tie together the earlier shorts into a more cohesive narrative.

Fanny Crane Shawe Ozer is the matriarch of the Herne family, although her daughter Jane Shawe Herne is the first to bear the name of the title. Like her mother, she was postmistress of Klatsand for a while and thus deeply interwoven into many of the Klatsand residents’ lives. Lily Frances and Virginia continue the line, with each one being very much a woman of her time without ever becoming a stereotype.

In overall summary, this is a story of American life and times in a part of America that got marooned in the mid-twentieth century, epitomising the good and the bad that go with that time and place. It is an enjoyable, entertaining and enlightening read, which shows a different side of Le Guin’s writing when compared to her, arguably more well-known, fantasy works such as the Earthsea Quartet.

– David A. Troman
 
 

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THIS IS ONE OF THE MOST UNFORGETTABLE BOOKS THAT I HAVE READ RECENTLY. Having read Nemirovsky’s Suite Francaise, which describes life in France after the German invasion in June 1940, I was struck by how Fallada shows the Gestapo in Berlin obsessively celebrating the French defeat. In this sense, Alone in Berlin is almost a mirror image of life in Berlin within the same time frame as Nemirovsky’s book.

Such is Fallada’s depiction of Berlin that one is left with a sense of the city and its denizens being under a constant grey mantle. The fog is both physical and mental. The plot concerns the reactions of ordinary Germans to the Nazification of everyday life. The perfectly ordinary Otto Quangel, with his ‘birdlike face, thin lips and cold eyes’, is an unlikely hero. His son, also called Otto, is killed in the war and Anna, his wife, in a fit of grief, flings the accusation, ‘. . . that’s what you get from your wretched war, you and that Fuhrer of yours!’ Stung by this, Otto is driven to express his disgust at the regime by leaving anti-war and anti-Hitler postcards scattered around significant buildings in Berlin where people will find them. He knows that he is courting death and is initially reluctant to involve Anna. However, Anna is determined that people should be brought to their senses and persuaded to repudiate the Fuhrer.

The reaction to Otto’s cards is utter terror, and virtually all the cards are handed in to the police as people fear that any link to these will brand them as enemies of the regime. For about two years, Otto and Anna succeed in evading the authorities. The Berlin police nickname the anonymous postcard writer, the ‘Hobgoblin’. Eventually, the failure of the inspector, Escherich, to track down the ‘Hobgoblin’ attracts the attention of the local Gestapo.

Escherich uses pins on a map of Berlin to mark each find of the postcards. The hunt thus forms the armature of the story, around which various other fates are twisted, and most end up facing torture and death, leading to the question ‘was it worth it?’ Fallada, at the end of the book, suggests that one such moral step taken in an ocean of evil spiritually cleanses, even if it is physically futile, but he is subtle enough to let the reader make up their own opinion.

The book is based on a real case, and the afterword provides documentary samples of the real postcard writer and his wife, and some of the cards, and details their fate. Fallada was one of the very few German writers of stature (he was internationally famous for the book Little Man, What Now?, which was made into a Hollywood film) who stayed in Nazi Germany throughout the war and could thus take in the whole atmosphere of the Third Reich. Alone in Berlin (whose German title translates as Everyone Dies Alone) is thus an early work of ‘faction’, in which the border between reportage and fiction is breached. There are even videos of the historical prototype for the judge at the Quangel’s trial available on the net www.youtube.com.

This makes one look at the book in a different way and to say that was how it must have been, rather than regarding it as historical fiction. Given the background the book is unremittingly harrowing. A host of characters of various degrees of vileness is leavened by a handful of good people, such as the retired Judge Fromm, a neighbour of Otto and Anna, who hides the Jewish widow, Frau Rosenthal, in his flat. He also gives the condemned Otto and Anna suicide ampoules of cyanide – which both decide not to use until the end.

Central to the narrative is the fate of Inspector Escherich, whose attempts to find the perpetrator initially fail. The Gestapo, angered by his failure, imprison and torture Escherich. His replacement also fails and Escherich is reinstated to complete the ‘Hobgoblin’ mission. When Escherich finally catches Otto and confronts him, he realises the futility of the Nazi myth and kills himself – his one redeeming act. The Persicke family, also neighbours of Otto and Anna, are a chilling embodiment of the Nazi ethos. Baldur, the sixteen-year old son, is a member of the Hitler Jugend and openly says,’We all want to get ahead in life, and how are we going to do it except through the Party? . . . we should follow the Fuhrer’s lead and make mugs of people, put on friendly expressions and then, when no one senses any threat, take care of business.’ This rhetoric has a sinister culmination in two instances. The first is when the Persickes decide to torture the Jewish widow, Frau Rosenthal, and ransack her flat. The second instance involves Baldur banishing his alcoholic father to a medical centre where patients are used in experiments. He orders the doctor in charge to inject his father with a chemical, which kills him.

Rather than individual characters, however powerfully drawn, it is the appalling atmosphere of a totalitarian state, where everyone is prepared to rat on everyone else to save their skin and the apparent futility of any resistance to the all-pervading evil, that haunts the reader long after the last page has been turned.

– Golden Langur
 
 

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