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|  | | Marjaleena Lembcke is admired by readers and critics for her “mastery of the light touch”. With poetic sensitivity, her writing brings to light the kinds of incidents and relationships that can only too quickly be suppressed, forgotten or overlooked. Her stories, based on experiences of her own Finnish childhood and youth, are eloquent evidence of her skills. She observes everyday life at close quarters, describes nature in beautiful but never sentimental images, and apparently in passing she discloses the secrets, both large and small, that people carry around with them.
The Foxes of Andorra is the title of her latest story. What those friendly creatures are doing in a story that begins in the plains of north-west Germany, before moving to Finland in the summer holidays and then returning to ten-year-old Sophie’s home, will come as a real surprise to readers. But it is only one of many surprises awaiting us during the summer that Sophie describes.
At first glance, Sophie’s joys and sorrows are those of any girl of ten in the kind of family familiar to us form children’s literature far and wide. A particularly pleasing aspect is the fact that from the start the picture of family life presented in her story does not allow us to judge the nature of its inner drama – unless we consider it a drama that Sophie is one of four siblings of exactly the same age.
Quadruplets in the Münsterland region! We do not know exactly, bur can imagine, what difficulties Sophie’s mother may have had to contend with since her pregnancy. At the moment, however, it seems to be business as usual in the family. Yes, the children’s mother has melancholy moods from time to tie, but that is not necessarily a reason for great anxiety. After all, the quads are past the age when they were most demanding, and they are developing their own striking and very different personalities.
Jonathan is described as “the cleverest”, Felix as “the heftiest”, Frederike as “the smallest and shyest”, and Sophie as “the most sensible”, but of course that is not the whole truth. In the family, however – as usual in Lembcke’s stories – it is to be taken for granted that the qualities of the individual children may not be reflected in their dispositions. We hear, for instance, about the evident developmental disturbance of Frederike, the last-born. Marjaleena Lembcke describes life from the point of view of those concerned. She never, therefore, runs the risk of looking down on her characters from the outside, even with the best of dramatic or therapeutic intentions.
And so life pursues an obviously normal course. Sophie tells the reader about her longing for a best friend. She would like to make contact with a girl in the parallel class to hers at school, whose courage she admires, but does not quite dare to make the first approach. She looks forward with some misgivings to the move on to secondary school. She describes the little house where the family live; her sister and brothers, the tales of imaginary journeys told by their father, which the children always enjoy, and their mother’s reliability.
All the time, we sense the warm family atmosphere surrounding Sophie. “We loved our father. We loved our mother too, but in a different way. Mother was like a calm, familiar place; it wasn’t an exciting place, but we felt safe there. Father told us stories of other places, stories of adventure in which we played the main parts.”
Finally, Sophie also tells us about the generosity and candour of her aunt, a psychotherapist, who is always there to offer the family a change from the daily round of their lives, for instance when she invites all six to go on holiday to Finland. Again, Marjaleena Lembcke remains on an even keel in describing their encounter with what is new and strange, in the shape of a Finnish family living in the country – just the kind of thing we all remember from our own holiday trips with children.
At the same time we hear of the family’s increasing concern for their mother’s condition, and as sympathetic readers we share it. What is the matter with her? Why does she sometimes seem so abstracted and tired? And what does all this have to do with the foxes of Andorra? – But we are not giving that away here. Read the book for yourselves. It is a book in which Marjaleena Lembcke once again does justice to her reputation as mistress of the light touch.
Siggi Seuss
August 2011
[Translated by Anthea Bell]
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