Clara's Daughter by Meike Ziervogel
Clara’s Daughter, in the short space of 144 pages, paints the portrait of the relationships threatening to destroy a family unit. The intensity is conveyed with sharp stabs from Ziervogel’s spare sentences.
| Clara's Daughter by Meike Ziervogel | |
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| Category: Literary Fiction | |
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Reviewer: Patricia Duffaud
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| Summary: An exquisite novella about the relationships between mother and daughter, wife and husband. | |
| Buy? Yes | Borrow? Yes |
| Pages: 144 | Date: September 2014 |
| Publisher: Salt Publishing | |
| External links: Author's website | |
| ISBN: 978-1907773792 | |
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Michele’s mother Clara can no longer live on her own. Should she be put into a home, as Jim, Michele’s husband, insists on? Or should she move into Michele’s basement? Filial love doesn’t seem to play a part in the ultimate decision. Concerns over the inheritance on the part of Hilary, Michele’s emotionally manipulative sister, and Michele’s own guilt are the driving forces. The daughters are caught up in the demanding routines of busy lives, leaving little time to analyse and feel. Clara is more clear-eyed. In her role of matriarch, she will eventually see the extent of the unfolding tragedy much more accurately than the others do. The pain this causes her will jolt her out of her own dejection.
We feel sorry for Michele, who is bound by her unemotional personality (a ‘cold fish’, in the words of her mother). But Clara is the most tragic character. A complex woman, mother of two middle-aged daughters, she’s always been defined in relation to them. Yet when she works at her pottery, we get a feeling of a potentially misused talent, of a yearning to do other things. But Clara finds it impossible to escape domesticity and after a promising sculpture of a mother and daughter, spends years making indifferent vases. The symbolism of the mother/daughter sculpture is potent. It looms over the book. Is it Clara’s best sculpture because its subject was so important to her? Michele is aware of the honour of receiving the statuette as a gift, but her husband scoffs at it.
Jim is described as ‘accommodating’ yet it is his intransigence, brought on by an untimely middle-aged crisis, which endangers the couple’s relationship. His character is subtly drawn, even though his reactions are no different from those of similar men, in similar novels and films. In such a situation, the range of gestures available to people is limited, especially in the setting of an upper-middle-class Hampstead household. But the force that drives him, the final, mulish single-mindedness, we recognise as one of the tragic masculine waves capable of destroying everything before them. The area of the potential disaster is small – a comfortable family in North London – yet Ziervogel’s talent means the reader cares about the outcome of the drama. She uses flashbacks of the couple’s warm embraces to precisely convey how harmonious their marriage used to be. She circles the defining incident between them with these flashbacks and with leaps forward in time. This structure works well; it feels like the autopsy of a network of family relationships, with the writer as a highly-skilled pathologist and the readers as mesmerized medical students.
For more by this author, try her first novel, Magda. And for another tale of an uneasy mother and daughter relationship, do have a look at A Woman's Story by Annie Ernaux. You might also like Breathing in Colour by Clare Jay.
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You can read more book reviews or buy Clara's Daughter by Meike Ziervogel at Amazon.com.
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