What an amazing experience is The Crooked Maid. I picked it up because it made the Giller Prize shortlist, and judged alongside the other books I've read on that list so far, this would have been my choice for the prize -- with apologies to the actual winner, Hellgoing, which I also quite enjoyed. Absolutely thrilling and rich in detail, Dan Vyleta's goal -- "I wanted to write a world, not a book" -- is fully and compellingly realised (I do believe I'm gushing).
Set in Vienna in 1948, a time and place I haven't given much thought to, Denazification is wrapping up and the Cold War is just beginning. The streets are still filled with wartime rubble and the citizens go about with their threadbare coats and ration books, escaping their bleak realities with homemade schnapps in rundown bars, rubbing elbows with those who thought Hitler was martyred and those who were broken in his concentration camps. An early scene from the city:
Across from the gateway, in a house thrown open to the public eye by a bombed-away wall, a woman woke to her doll's house existence. She stretched, sang a snatch of Wehrmacht song, put a pot of water on the cooker; and, in the coarsest of Viennese dialects, tilting the "a" in arse into a drawn-out, listing oh-ah-rse, she cursed in lazy succession first the Germans, then the Allies, then the Jews, all of whom stood invited to insert into their backsides some unidentified object she seemed to think was clinging to her palm as she thrice performed a shoving motion in front of her broad hips.That doll's house view of the crazy lady perfectly captured the mood of the city and is one of dozens of such vignettes that are inserted throughout the book by Vyleta -- the Cambridge-educated Historian; the Czech-born, German-raised, now-residing-in-Canada author . As Vyleta himself said: “I’m a Czech-German writing in English — I’m screwed!” That Vyleta can so perfectly capture the time and place that is so foreign to me is, perhaps, no great authorial feat, but that English isn't his first language is a wonder -- the writing in The Crooked Maid is note perfect: whether describing someone's appearance or the bang-on dialogue or the mood-setting or the historical details that begin each section or the mysterious inclusion of a murder of crows or the breaking of the fourth wall (Chekhov said that if you introduce a gun in Act One, it has to go off in Act Three. He does not tell us what happens if you introduce it in Act Three), I was intrigued and beguiled at every turn.
This book begins with two wealthy strangers meeting on a train (with postscript acknowledgement given to Dostoevsky for the inspiration) -- Robert, a student returning from abroad, and Anna, a middle-aged, beautiful woman, who is also returning to Vienna after a long absence -- two people who wouldn't expect to cross paths again once they reach their destination, but who (a la Dickens, who is also acknowledged in the endnotes) find themselves joined by coincidences and a motley cast of characters: a "ghost" in a red scarf; a police detective; a foreign journalist; a Czech giant; and Eva, the titular "crooked maid":
It was her back that was twisted: not hunched, but spun like a twist of hair around a finger. It was as though she’d been caught in a perpetual pirouette, one hip higher than the other, the right shoulder leading, an odd sideways prancing to her ever-shuffling feet. If she could but unscrew herself: throw her chest out, gain some range of movement in that stiff and leaning neck; tuck in the shoulder blade that stuck out like a broken flipper.There are murders to solve and missing persons to find and the mysteries are drawn out just long enough to keep the reader engrossed and engaged. There are also former-Nazis and anti-Semites and a people, the Austrians, who are attempting to distance themselves from the Germans; to paint themselves as Hitler's first victims, not his first collaborators. To those who have been away, the attitudes and justifications of those who had to live through the war -- who had to find ways to survive the daily facts of their existence in occupied territory -- can be horrifying. When Robert confronts his brother Wolfgang over rumours of his behaviour in the SS, he explains:
"You remember, Robert, when we were children, Dad would take us fishing sometimes. He insisted we clean our own fish. First you slit them open with a narrow knife. From asshole to gills, so to speak. And then --" Wolfgang hooked two fingers, mimed the process of wrenching out the guts, then wiped his hand upon his tie. "I remember you didn't like it at first. You may even have cried. But after a while --" He shrugged, sour, amused. "You got to be pretty good at it, little brother. The blood didn't bother you at all."In addition to his brother's callousness, Robert finds that his mother is also still pro-Nazi and unapologetic for the Aryanization that funded her rise in riches (She had learned Nazism the way one learns any language: through constant repetition) and when he confronts Eva about the immorality of his family's attitudes, she replies:
"We are a people," she intoned, playful and serious all at once, "who have already forgiven themselves."And just as the threat from the SS is finally over, as the few surviving Jews are returning to find that the homes and businesses they were forced from are now occupied by Austrians who don't quite feel guilty enough to give them back ("The truth is that half the people on this street, they have a Jew walled in their closet. God, how they are hoping the mortar will hold."), there is a growing threat from the Soviets (one of four occupying powers in the postwar city) as people are being disappeared. This brings to full circle a book I read about a year ago, Nonna Bannister's The Secret Holocaust Diaries, a memoir written by a Ukranian who had been captured by Nazis as they invaded the Soviet Union. She and her mother were sent to work as slave labour in a factory in Germany, and although Nonna herself survived the war, her mother was eventually sent to her death in a concentration camp. Nonna was able to make her way to America after WWII was over, but as related in The Crooked Maid, many liberated Russians were afraid to be repatriated, for fear of being branded German collaborators and sent off to the frozen Gulags.
This is an incredible story set in an extraordinary time; a thrilling and thoroughly literary page-turner (pretty much what The Luminaries aspired to be), I can't recommend The Crooked Maid highly enough.
