With apologies to Cynthia Ozick, I have a confession to make.
A few weekends ago, I picked up a copy of Foreign Bodies–Ozick’s 2010 retelling of The Ambassadors by Henry James–at Milwaukee’s Downtown Books. The blurb on the back looked great: at the behest of her overbearing brother, a divorced schoolteacher travels to Paris to recover a nephew who won’t come home. I chose it over a few other titles of hers that were also available. Having recently finished The Hunger Angel (see below), I was looking to reward myself.
I was at least twenty-five pages into the book before I thought to add it to Goodreads, where I like to keep track of how many pages I’ve read. But what did I find but a rating–five stars! –that I’d already posted in 2019. Not only had I read it, but I’d written myself a paragraph or two of notes so I could remember what I’d liked. (That enormous piano in Bea Nightingale’s New York apartment did seem a little familiar.) Anyway, I enjoyed the book again, though I would have to say that Ozick peppers her writing with some very pungent smells. Still, the writing is unfailingly witty. Bea’s wayward nephew Julian Nachtigall (Bea’s brother Marvin has kept the original family name) fancies himself a literary expatriate in Paris. He flirts with American girls by asking them wryly, Gertrude or Alice? in apparent reference to Gertrude Stein and her lover. Bea, however, claims to be asking herself Hamlet’s own question: to Bea, or not to Bea? She responds drily to her ungrateful brother’s scornful letters, abetting Julian and his Romanian refugee wife with an accumulation of lies. And even before she manages to cast off her ex-husband Leo’s enormous piano, Julian’s younger sister Iris declares her independent aunt Bea “terrifically brave.” Still, when Bea finally holds Leo’s symphony in her hands, she can’t help seeing its key signature, “Bea Minor,” as a bit of a slur.
…
Nobel Prize-winning author Herta Muller was born in Romania in 1953 to German-speaking parents. After the war, Romania deported many ethnic Germans to Soviet forced labor camps. Such is the fate of Leo Auberg, the narrator of The Hunger Angel (translated by Philip Boehm). Muller conducted extensive interviews with poet and camp survivor Oskar Pastior with the intention of co-writing a novel about the camps, where her own mother spent five years. But Pastior died, and Muller was left to complete the project on her own (see the Afterword).
When seventeen-year-old Leo is deported, he is eager to leave home. There is a collar of silence around his homosexuality that he associates with the lamb around the shoulders of the statue of a saint near the cathedral. Leo’s relatives equip him with an assortment of castoffs–after all, what does it matter what he brings to the camp? –which he packs into the case that is removed from the family’s gramophone. But his grandmother assures him, “I know you’ll come back.”
Before long, “the hunger angel climbs to the roof of [Leo’s] mouth and hangs his scales” (p. 77). What follows is a brutal evocation of starvation conditions, but the book is so beautifully written that it’s hard to tear oneself away. After work, the inmates are allowed to go begging for food before they return to the camp, and Leo brings a piece of coal as an offering. A Russian woman whose son has been deported to Siberia gives him a liter of potato soup and, when his nose starts running, a white batiste handkerchief. Leo can neither use this handkerchief nor trade it for food because he comes to believe that “the handkerchief was my fate. And once you let your fate pass out of your hands, you’re lost. I was convinced that my grandmother’s parting sentence I KNOW YOU’LL COME BACK had turned into a handkerchief” (p. 74). Muller explores the distortions of identity, compassion, and humanity that take place in the camp, along with the difficulties of adjusting to freedom afterward. I heartily recommend this book, but only if you are made of very strong stuff.
Joan Elizabeth Bauer 