Back to Back
*Starred Review* The personal and the political intertwine in this novel of fractured childhood in East Germany. Headstrong Ella and her sensitive brother, Thomas, are variously abused and neglected by their mother, Käthe, a sculptor whose zeal for the newborn socialist state is surpassed only by her relentless careerism. In their run-down estate on the frigid Müggelsee, Thomas models nude for his mother and dreams of being a writer but is sent off to work in a rock quarry, while Ella hides under the bed in a futile effort to avoid being molested by a secret agent that the family has taken in as a lodger. The Berlin Wall goes up, and lives fall apart; heartbreak ensues. As she did in the acclaimed Blindness of the Heart (2010), Franck mines her family’s past for inspiration: Käthe may be a personification of the cruel idealism of the German Democratic Republic, but she is also modeled after the author’s grandmother, artist Ingeborg Hunzinger, and fragments of Thomas’ poetry scattered throughout the novel are attributed to Franck’s uncle, a young suicide. There is no Ostalgie here, just a powerful elegy. --Brendan Driscoll