Book review

Julia Franck: Die Mittagsfrau

Lady Midday is also known as Poludnica in Polish or Slovak, or as Pscipolnitsa in Wendish mythology. She is a demon that appears in the middle of hot summer days, carrying shears or a scythe. She engages anyone working at that time in conversation, asking them tricky questions, and if they cannot answer, cuts off their heads. Julia Franck herself talks in an interview of a version she knows: this fate can be avoided by explaining the processing of flax for one hour. Talking as a way of saving your life.

The story opens at the end of WW2. Peter (8 yrs old) and his mother are preparing to flee west from Stettin (now Szczecin). Just over the border, Peter’s mother settles him on a bench at a station while she goes to look for tickets and something to eat. She never comes back.

The main part of the book is a reconstruction of the mother’s life.  How can a woman  abandon her child, how could she come to believe that child would be better off anywhere rather than with her? The most successful part is the description of her childhood in a small town in Lusatia, her close relationship with her nine year older sister, Martha and their teasing erotic games, her strange and disturbingly cold mother, the father who is injured in an accident in WW1 (in what nowadays would be called ‘friendly fire’) and comes home to die of his wounds despite (because of?) Martha’s care. How much morphium did she administer?

The two girls move alone to Berlin. This is the decadent, hedonistic Berlin of the twenties we know from books and films, and this is the part that feels less original, not only in the material, but also in the narration. Helene falls in love, but her fiancée is killed in a traffic accident: her ambition to study medicine is frustrated and she ends up in a rather unlikely one-sided marriage, to a man who is disgusted to find that she is not a virgin. He fathers her child, but quickly turns away from her.

The closing scene brings us back to Peter, hiding away in the loft of the barn when Helene at last comes to visit him for the first time, on his seventeenth birthday.

I very much enjoyed this for the first 180 pages or so, but then it flattened off. I can see that the idea was that the coldness of Helene’s upbringing and the tragedy of her lost love would force her to retreat into silence, but somehow it wasn’t entirely convincing. Good, but not great.