Maja Haderlap

As I was taking the cows to pasture, a policeman came and hung me from the walnut tree.

Books by poets are always more about sound than anything else to me. Maja Haderlap is a poet; I can tell even in translation from German. Angel of Oblivion is all sound, rhythm, cadence. But then it's transient too. We can float only until we realize that not much happens in a book of sound.

There are stories. Our narrator grows up, a Carinthian Slovene in Austria, within sight of the Yugoslav border. show more Post-war, her community is a melting pot of troubles, othered by the German-speaking Austrians for their Slovenian dialect and their group's partisan resistance of the Nazis (and hence any collaborating Austrians) during the Second World War. Everyone is troubled. The traumas of the older generation (concentration camp survivors, PTSD suffering former partisans, torture victims) leech into the lives of the young. You can think of it like genetic memory. You can think of it like poison from both nature and nurture.

And they tell stories. The partisans meet again and again as our narrator grows to tell their stories again and again. Nothing is forgotten. Nothing is let go. Poems smuggled out of Auschwitz published in minority Slovenian Austrian journals. Who betrayed whom. Who fought valiantly. Who was taken. Who survived. Who didn't. Telling ourselves stories in order to live.

Our narrator goes to Bled, as we all should do.

Rhythm, sound, fragments. Don't forget, but don't expect a linear plot line and a traditional story either.

Angel of Oblivion by Maja Haderlap went on sale August 16, 2016.

I received a copy free from Netgalley in exchange for an honest review. show less

Mostly not my kind of thing, but extremely artful and interesting in its own way. The early chapters are bucolic, which is nice for about twenty pages, but perhaps ran on for too long; by far the more interesting sections of the book are towards the end, when Haderlap starts playing with history, dreams, and ideas, rather than reporting the details of Grandmother's herb-drying technique. But that's more or less unavoidable: this is a linear bildungsroman, and Haderlap is an intelligent show more enough author that she doesn't want to start out all sophisticated, when the focal character is a child. Later in the novel, Haderlap confesses that it is hard for her to write in the first person, which explains much of the novel: like Anthony Powell's Dance to the Music of Time, this is a book about a person who barely even exists in the book; she (or he, in Powell) acting more as a camera than as a consciousness for most of the time. Here's what Grandmother did, what Father said, what Mother felt--very little, though, about what grand-daughter/daughter felt, said, or did, until she's suddenly an acclaimed poet.

No doubt plenty of readers will have my experience upside-down, very much appreciating the rich details of the first half, and feeling alienated by the cold events of the second half. As a reading experience, this will doubtless frustrate almost everyone; as a work of art, it is exceptional in being able to combine herb-drying techniques (along with other details that rapidly passed out of my memory) with reflections on language and identity, history, and psychology. At different moments it reminded me of, inter alia, Josef Winkler's catalogues of brutality, Ferrante's best moments (i.e., when she's dealing with the fall-out from the fascist years and the years of lead), and Chirbes' 'On the Edge,' which also dealt with the fall-out of fascism.

There's also a problem of context. I just read a review (okay: I read a headline) about a book translated from Korean--North Korean. The review (okay, headline) was something like "books translated from particularly under-represented languages quickly look more like anthropology than art." That's a real problem here. I knew nothing about Slovenian resistance to Nazism, nor about the Slovenian minority in Austria. I learned about that from this book; I would have enjoyed the book as book much more had that not been the case. Sad. I guess I'll have to re-read it. show less

This review is from: Engel des Vergessens (Hardcover)
Maja Haderlap collects the fragments of memory from a Slovenian peasant family's resistance to the Nazi's in Austria. She arranges the shards of half-forgotten, half re-imagined persecution in the order she heard them as a child growing up in postwar Europe, gradually understanding the bits her grandmother tells her, gradually understanding her father's erratic behavior. The book is labeled a novel, so fiction, but it all feels real. The show more narrator-author is successful at school and makes a career in theater, but is haunted by the family stories that she understands better with each year. The slow accumulation of names, facts, rumors, mixed with folklore about the Partisans, songs, poems, it all builds up a simply described respectful memorial to the suffering of this ethnic enclave. The mixed reaction to the independence of the Yugoslav state of Slovenia, triggers tension with the Slovenians on the Austrian side of the border. The old battles against the Nazi's resurface with the Cold War battles with the Communists, and just whose side to choose in a borderland. Once the narrator has grown up she can describe her father's condition with a gently poetic heap of brutal details, but the reader can immediately recognize his condition as post-traumatic stress syndrome. At that point she breaks into the narrative and explains she will not use this unnamed clinical term that sounds like a word storm. Her grandmother and then her father pass away, but she has received the memories along with the concentration camp notebook of her grandmother, and a notebook of camp poetry. She visits the camp. In the archives she finds the traces of her grandmothers imprisonmen. Not everything is forgotten. show less

Plot:
A Slovenian farming family in Carinthia, Austria who pick up the pieces after World War II. The grandfather was a partisan fighter, the grandmother was interned in a concentration camp where many of their neighbors, friends and also family died. The father was himself a child at the time, but that didn’t save him from being drawn into the fighting. His daughter, still a child, is now trying to piece together her own family’s history, to understand what happened while the Nazis were show more in power – and also afterwards, tracing the many scars left from their regime.

Engel des Vergessens sheds light on a little discussed chapter of World War II in a highly personal way. Haderlap has a beautiful way with language and conjures an extremley vivid image of what it must have been like to grow up at the time and in that area of Austria.

Read more on my blog: https://kalafudra.com/2020/02/25/engel-des-vergessens-angel-of-oblivion-maja-had... show less