I changed my mind about this book several times while I was in the process of reading it - ultimately I went from thinking it was just okay to thinking it was amazing. Told in short, clipped and understated sentences, it rather resembles a book in translation. So much of the book is revealed not by what is written as by what is left unsaid. The obvious love and romance in the story come across as unsentimental - clipped just like the book's sentences. A multi-generational story, it captures a wonderful array of feelings and emotions that all seem very genuine. What might otherwise be interpreted as often being cold and austere, ends up revealing itself to be an exploration of a transcendent empathy. Highly recommended. ( )

The premise of this novel sounded intriguing: Beate's family escaped from the DDR in the sixties, when she was a small girl. After the Wende, she decides to move back from America to her parents' old house on the Baltic coast, taking her two teenage children with her. The son is gay, the daughter gets involved with trying to protect a group of refugees who are being intimidated by Neo-nazis, and Beate has to find a way to make a living in a community that is crumbling away into emigration and unemployment.

And of course that is interesting, for the length of a chapter or two. Unfortunately, once he's set up that situation, Grattan doesn't seem to have any very clear ideas how to fill up the gaps he's left himself between 1966 and 1990 in one direction, and between 1990 and 2016 in the other. He simply lets his characters behave in the sort of random, purposeless and inconsistent ways that would be perfectly normal for real people, but isn't what we look for when we're paying someone to make up an interesting story about them. There are no resolutions, no lessons to be learnt, no development of characters, no unusual insights into the larger problems of the world around them, it's just one damn thing after another (except during the flashback chapters, when of course it's one damn thing before another).

It's a shame that Grattan is such a competent and reasonably lively writer, because you are left feeling how much better a book this could have been. When he's not trying too hard, he has no trouble keeping you interested in the detail of what he's telling you about. He does clearly feel a sense of obligation to be literary occasionally, with unfortunate and rather distracting results ("Beate's daughter was like a Russian novel: admirable, but difficult to hold."). The German setting of most of the book and the convention that much of the time characters are speaking German where we read English also get him into trouble: people say things that just don't back-translate into German in any obvious way (people in the DDR addressing each other as "Citizen" as though they were in 1790s France); there are incongruously American things like buckets of ice and garden swimming pools, or someone "runs a stop sign". And then there's that mid-sixties German hospital with rooms full of beeping machines, which allows patients to phone home in the middle of the night...

On the whole, I wouldn't recommend this, but Grattan looks like someone to watch. The problems of this novel are mostly technical, and he's clearly got things to say: I'm sure his next book will be better. ( )

Peculiar. Almost constant gratuitous swearing that adds nothing. It felt like the rambling discourses of disenfranchised teens anywhere despite the time and poverty specifics. It felt so disjointed and somewhat repetitive. Maybe it's just too 2020 for me but others will find deep meaning in it.
I requested and received a free ebook copy from Farrar, Straus and Giroux/MCD via NetGalley. ( )

This was not a book I enjoyed. So many characters are interesting, but I never felt close to them. The story of a divorced woman living in New York state, Beate, and who two children who move back to her childhood home in eastern Germany after the reunification of the country. The story is told through the eyes of three generations of the family. As I reflect upon what I read, I would say the strength of this book revolves around the mood of the story and it seems so sad. Beate’s sudden uprooting from East Germany to West Germany, her children who are struggling with their identity and call their Mother “the German lady” and the reflections on what life was like under Soviet rule all lend themselves to the discomfort of the characters. ( )