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Norbert Gstrein
Winters in the South
Carl Hanser Verlag
Munich 2008
ISBN 978-3-446-23048-4
288 pages
War breaks out in Yugoslavia the summer of 1991. Reports are piling up of fighting, villages burning and the first victims. Those who are able to get away, flee the country. Yet one person chooses the opposite path, Marija. She turns her back on her secure life in Vienna to settle in Zagreb for an indefinite period of time. Why? She doesn’t know.
The Austrian writer Norbert Gstrein has devised a captivating plot in his recent book Winters in the South. Set primarily in Yugoslavia, the Balkan war once again – as in his earlier novel, The Business of Killing (2003) – plays a decisive role in the award-winning author’s latest work. But unlike the earlier novel, the events do not focus solely on the 90s, rather the narrative covers a greater span of time, encompassing the political and human turmoil of the end of World War II. The perspective, too, is different. Previously the question was whether it is possible to write a commensurate novel about the war, here the events of the war function as a backdrop to the story of two lives.
Two lives, two fates. They could not be more different and yet they are inextricably linked. First, there is Maria (50ish), who as a child had fled from Zagreb to Vienna with her mother and remained there ever since – spending decades at the side of a man whom she once had admired and for whom she now feels nothing but contempt. And secondly, there is the "old man" (tellingly, he remains nameless), a Croatian fascist during WWII, who after fleeing from a prison of war camp emigrated to Argentina. He lives there with his third wife and two young daughters. The renewed flare up of the Balkan conflict compels both the old man and Maria to return to Zagreb after being away for nearly a half a century.
The novel reveals their lives through a clever device of switching between flashback and the present day: sometimes the narrator follows on Marija’s heels, at others on Ludwig’s, who serves as a sort of adjutant to the old man. Particularly in the first section of the book, Gstrein creates suspense by gradually revealing the true nature of the relationships through hints and allusions: What, for example, is the reason for Maria's inferiority complex? and why is the old man so obsessed by his Croatian past? In places the book works like a puzzle for the reader, the parts fitting together only gradually into a coherent picture.
What Maria does not know, and what the old man has repressed for a long time is: he is her father; the man she believed to be dead for 45 years. Only in Zagreb does she learn by chance that he is still alive. Of course, through flashbacks the reader suspects there is some sort of a connection, but we don’t know why the father disappeared back then, nor do we know why he has shown no sign of being alive for all these years. And, even more interesting: will the two meet again? And, if so, what will happen when they meet? This question plays a subliminal role throughout the entire novel. Gstrein’s masterful narrative is not only a matter of his fastidious attention to the composition of different levels of narration and his skillful ability to build tension, but also in the epic tone that characterizes the novel: long sentences rich with imagery and rhythmic language makes for the unique tone of these two melancholically hued, yet never sentimental life stories.
The more we learn about Marija throughout the course of this complex novel, the more we see the central role her father plays in her life, in spite of - or perhaps, because of - his absence. And in two respects: As a child she had missed him terribly, and she would ask complete strangers when he’d finally return. As an adult she believed for decades she had to be ashamed of her father's past. She often had to defend herself from her husband, who during arguments (he had once been a full-fledged Communist), would blame her for her father’s deeds.
And the Father? One could hardly call the old man nice, at best, he’s an eccentric fellow. And his relationship to his daughter? To the daughter he had turned his back on after the war, and allowed to believe he was dead all these years? There are strong signs that he is not happy with his life. Yet he seems to have repressed the past so thoroughly, and is so far removed from reality that he has lost any semblance of real human emotions. He is possessed by only one thing, the war. He never got over the defeat from back then and still lives his life "like a soldier on call". His shooting range in the basement, where he practices every day, is just one example of this. Now that war has again broken out in the Balkans, he sees his chance to take up the struggle again, "which hadn’t been played out to the end back then."
That the father and daughter never end up meeting is good news for the reader. For how could such an encounter be depicted, other than ending in disaster or implausible kitsch? More significantly, after over a half a lifetime, Marija starts to deal with having a living father while in Zagreb. What they realize during this process takes them far beyond a mere father-daughter conflict. Marija realizes that her absent father was her alibi for being a "girl waiting" so that she wouldn’t have to deal with her life: "She had often wondered whether her life would have felt so arbitrary, or whether it would have been more vital, perhaps more difficult, in the paradise she kept in her memory."
Yet, it is not only Maria, who suffers from the "arbitrariness" of their existence, so too, her father, her husband, and Louis, the adjutant. With the war in the background - the realm of existential action, decisions, necessity - the sense of arbitrariness comes all the more clearly to the fore. Questions and contrasts such as these are the basic theme of the book. Norbert Gstrein has not written a simple father-daughter story, rather it is a book about marriage and a war report – revolving around the ever-present question of what constitutes a meaningful life.
Anne Nordmann
November 2009
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