Someday We'll Tell Each Other Everything by Daniela Krien
| Someday We'll Tell Each Other Everything by Daniela Krien | |
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| Category: General Fiction | |
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Reviewer: John Lloyd
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| Summary: Perhaps with too slender a feel for some, I found this study of love from Germany a brilliantly balanced, clever and absorbing couple of hours. | |
| Buy? Yes | Borrow? Yes |
| Pages: 208 | Date: June 2014 |
| Publisher: MacLehose Press | |
| ISBN: 9781782062417 | |
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Eastern Germany, and the country is in the limbo-land of time that lay between the end of the Communist state of the DDR and reunification. Teenager Maria is also in a limbo-land of a kind herself, living on a farm with the Brendels family, but not one of them. The matriarch still speaks to her in the third person for one, and while she does some of the house- and farm-work, and is in a relationship with the wannabe photographer son of the family, she knows she's not quite settled within those walls. Especially, as she is to learn, when there is a neighbour who can stir passionate emotions inside her…
This book works as a love story, pure and simple. When you look at the plot it boils down to something nicely old-fashioned, but this doesn't become a fault. It is a sort of period piece, with the distinct time and place here, but that's worn very lightly, and it doesn't come across as distinctly Germanic. What it does carry is the sense of this limbo-land, a boundary between one country becoming another, a girl becoming a woman, and a village slowly – privy by privy, room by room, house by house, attitude by attitude – modernising.
Similarly the book is at the boundary between literary and general fiction, although for me falls in the latter. Yes the title comes from paraphrasing Dostoyevsky, and Maria is bookish and finds such a thing appealing even when there's a farm to be managed, but the feel is much more open and everyone should be able to engage. The title is a strength in the end, for such simple words carry a lot of depth – and the threat and danger you can read into them is all on these pages.
The narrative style is an intriguing one too. Beginning with a naively drawn depiction of the farm and its surroundings, there are times when Maria provides what reads as something very suitably childish, almost a letter home approach. But Krien, with her first published novel, manages something much more than just a naïve narrator. The passion is there, and with the first person narration it's completely evident. It again can seem passé – oh, it's Lolita snags her Mellors – but the fresh clarity of the narration brings the story to the reader with a warm understanding of teenage infatuation, and I think there is more self-awareness in the lead character here than in either of those two classics. Almost feeling like a cuckoo in the nest, Maria faces the guilt of accepting hospitality while her relationship with the photography student is failing and her love for the neighbour increasing.
I can see how this could be deemed a slight book – other writers would have made it a hundred page novella and be done with it. But for me this volume was great – there's certainly no padding, and the charms of being privy to Maria's passions fully justify spending a little more time with her company.
I must thank the publishers for my review copy.
Red Love: The Story of an East German Family by Maxim Leo looks academic, but is a non-fiction read of great renown about the differences the rise of East Germany had in real-life families. For another atmospheric novel regarding big Germanic issues set in that country I still can't see past A Wolf in Hindelheim by Jenny Mayhew.
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