The river was rough and greedy -- not ashamed to demand its rightful share: it strained against the embankment, swallowed rocks and gushed through the tiniest crevices. Though it offered no sheltered bays, Trudi would ride its turbulent waves, dart beneath them in her frog-swim, her heart beating fast as she became the river, claiming what was hers. As the river, she washed through the houses of people without being seen, got into their beds, their souls, as she flushed out their stories and fed on their worries about what she knew and what she might tell. Whenever she became the river, the people matched her power only as a group. Because the river could take on the town, the entire country.Trudi Montag is a Zwerg (a dwarf) born in the fictional German village of Burgdorf -- situated just outside Dusseldorf -- right after her father returned from fighting in WWI. After her mother goes crazy and dies before Trudi's fourth birthday, the little girl is raised by her heartbroken (and warbroken) father, and from her perch beside him at the town's pay library, Trudi learns to ferret out people's secrets, becoming the town's gossipmonger, storyteller, and informal historian. It is from this perspective that Trudi watches her neighbours morph from a typical community of friendships and petty jealousies into the kind of us-versus-them mentality that would allow the rise of Nazism and the turning of backs as Jewish neighbours are dragged from their homes in the middle of the night.
Because the subject matter feels so important, and because the author, Ursula Hegi, wrote Stones From the River to confront the silence that she grew up with in post WWII Germany, it's easy to think that this is an important book, but it really didn't work for me. Even with 500 pages, to span the four decades from 1915-1952 -- and to include a large cast of characters -- this narrative felt very rushed, with many long expository passages meant to move the timeline along. This jumping forward in the story didn't really allow me to get to know any of the characters other than Trudi herself, and as a result, there was no slow metamorphosis for those who became Nazis and Nazi sympathisers: the young men of Trudi's generation showed themselves from the beginning to be disdainful of "otherness" (bullying everyone outside the norm, and especially the dwarf Trudi) and the older folks seemed ordinary enough until pulled into fanaticism. The town jumped from normal to crazy to "we don't want to talk about it" and nothing was really explained along the way (which I would have thought to be the point).
Also, I've seen reviewers say that having the lead up to WWII shown through the eyes of a German dwarf is a brilliant way to dispassionately record events from the point of view of an "other", but since this was done already through Oskar's eyes in The Tin Drum, I found it to be a curiously unoriginal concept. (And especially since both dwarf protagonists seem to have quasi-magical powers: the fact that Trudi could see or feel the futures of everyone she met only served to further distance her from me; to make her more "other" than necessary.) As the Nazi presence expanded in Burgdorf, I was conscious of the extra danger that Trudi was in, but even her confrontation with an SS officer was a bit of a letdown:
"Don't you know what can happen to someone like you in our country? You become an experiment…a medical experiment for the almighty profession," he said, and told her of operations performed on twins, on people afflicted with otherness. "Because the rules that used to temper curiosity no longer exist…Some people might even tell you that a Zwerg has no right to live."This had to be acknowledged at some point, but the fact that Trudi wasn't exposed to any real menace just didn't feel truthful (and especially since she was vocally anti-Nazi). Capable of great love and great hatreds, the character of Trudi was just so unlikeable: she hoards people's secrets and spreads rumours designed to destroy her enemies; she is so greedy for love that she tries to steal affections; and she is so afraid of being disliked or misunderstood for her dwarfism that she pushes people away and then scorns them for abandoning her. That this complicated character is the only one we really get to know didn't add anything to my understanding of the time, and overall, I just feel let down by this book. Again, important subject matter doesn't make for an important work, as easy as it might be to conflate the two.
*****
And I don't have enough to say about the following to give it its own page, but since I did enjoy it, I'll piggyback it here:
A Touch of Magic
This collection is half about the stories themselves and half about the performance of their reading, and as a result of that, it was for me a fairly uneven experience. John Lithgow brings his own brand of zany melodrama to The Monkey's Paw and Stephen Colbert is drily ironic with The Veldt, and these are very enjoyable to listen to. But when the stories and the performers are both unfamiliar (like Anthony Rapp reading The Year of Silence or Bernadette Quigley doing Drunken Mimi), I was less engaged. Overall, though, I did enjoy the concept and the execution of having these stories told by seasoned storytellers; this was a very different experience than listening to other short story collections on audiobook. I see this is part of a whole series put out by Symphony Space and I would be happy to explore their format further.
And a further note: I downloaded this collection because it had a story by Aimee Bender (Drunken Mimi) and this was the only title other than The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake that my library had; a reading quest I began after failing to find her story Ironhead online while reading The Storied Life of A. J. Fikrey. I can't say that Bender's story was one of the strongest in this collection and I may need to reconsider plumbing her depths.
