Marguerite Andersen

The reasons why an elderly German lady who has been living in Toronto for many years should be writing a book in French slowly become clear as we follow her exploration of her own past - including some disagreeable parts she has been avoiding thinking about for a long time - and her attempt to answer the inevitable question "where do you come from?" in the run-up to a big family party that has been planned for her 84th birthday.

Although it's presented as a novel, this is unambiguously intended to be read as non-fiction. The author looks back at her life in 20s and 30s Germany with her far from everyday parents, Martha - daughter of the well-known theologian Reinhold Seeberg - and Theodor Bohner - a writer, born in Ghana where his parents were serving as Lutheran missionaries. There's a lot of fascinating detail about the life of a liberal middle-class family in those times, and Marguerite's portrayal of herself as a little girl is both convincing and funny.

But of course the real story is about the political change that was going on in the background, and which she was only intermittently aware of. With hindsight, she now understands the quarrel between Theo (a mild liberal who sat in the Prussian state parliament) and Seeberg, whose strongly nationalist and anti-semitic publications after World War I helped give a veneer of intellectual respectability to the Nazis. And of course she has to try to find a way of dealing with the knowledge that the grandfather she loved and was a little in awe of was an inciter of crimes against humanity.

This isn't really a very obviously Canadian book. The French it's written in is rather metropolitan, possibly a bit old-fashioned, but elegant and a pleasure to read. There are certainly more Germanisms than Americanisms in the text. I thought at first that there was some sort of eccentric spelling convention in play, but after a few pages I worked out that it was simply an incompetent e-book conversion which had somehow messed up all the ligatures ("fammes" instead of "flammes"; "ofce" instead of "office", etc.). Irritating, but not enough to spoil what was otherwise a very interesting and enjoyable book.… (meer)

This book, while fiction, is autobiographical. Marguerite is looking back on her life and her choices, especially those that involved her children. At times, she physically left them with their father or other relatives. Other times, she felt she "left" them as she was too involved in her studies or her work, She wonders if she has been a bad mother in her attempt to be her own person. It's a very honest book. I found it hard not to judge Marguerite, even though she seems to be her own harshest critic.… (meer)