Anna Maschik Wenn du es heimlich machen willst, musst du die Schafe töten
[If you want to do it in secret, you have to kill the sheep]

Anna Maschik, who was born in Vienna in 1995, opens her debut novel with a spectacular scene which gives the book its title. Henrike, a farming woman, hangs the doors and windows of her washhouse with heavy woollen blankets; no sound or light must be allowed to get out. Then she fetches a sheep from the shed, kills it with a bolt gun, skins it in a practised and professional manner and proceeds to gut it:

With the broad butcher’s knife she makes a cut in the belly, pushes two fingers into the slit and holds one either side of the knife to protect the guts from the sharp blade. Carefully she pulls knife and fingers in a straight line to the breastbone, and the sheep flips open in front of her like a book.

Why is it a sheep that is slaughtered, rather than, say, a pig? Because sheep endure their death in silence, whereas pigs emit bloodcurdling screams when they are slaughtered. And why does Henrike have to ‘do it secretly’? Because the slaughtering of animals in wartime Germany was strictly regulated and the animals regularly counted by the village police. If any were missing, you had to have a good excuse.

In her brief prologue, Anna Maschik skilfully establishes the motifs that will run throughout her slim but intense and cleverly constructed novel: war and womanhood, death and transience, and above all an incisive exploration of the body. She may go over old ground in covering such topics as rural life and Nazism (never named as such in the text), but the way in which she tells her story is unconventional and surprising. Starting with Henrike, who was born in a north German village in 1900, Maschik follows the lives of three generations of women. There are, of course, men too, but they don’t feature in the story until they come into contact with the female characters: this chronicle of family life is told from a female point of view. The story is reconstructed by omniscient narrator Alma, Henrike’s great-granddaughter. ‘[M]y tale is a haruspicina,’ she says at the beginning, ‘an inspection of entrails’. In an interview, Anna Maschik has said that looking into family history is ‘an intimate and bloody business. We see the organs that keep us alive, but we are probably creeped out by them too. At the same time, telling the story of a family is a kind of reverse fortune-telling. We interpret signs in the present, not in order to predict what will happen in the future but to explain what happened in the past. In fact, we know almost as little about the past as about the future.’

Because of this, none of what we read in the novel is reliable; it remains piecemeal, fragmentary. And yet there is insight and continuity in its mere 240 pages. Take, for example, the idea that it’s impossible to break free of patterns. Each generation of women, from Henrike to her daughter, Hilde, and Alma’s mother, Miriam, is at first reluctant to assume the role of motherhood. Each woman thinks she will do something different with her life from the generation before, only to end up casting herself in the same old mould. Meanwhile, the scene moves from northern Germany to Vienna: Hilde, Alma’s grandmother, meets an Austrian soldier in the war and bears his child; after the war, she will embark on an unhappy marriage with him in Vienna where his family are manufacturers.

Anna Maschik’s book is not strictly realist; it’s a story in the South American tradition of magical realism. Hilde’s brother Benedikt lies asleep for more than a decade, sung to by his mother, before one day getting up and living his life as though nothing had happened. A midwife and a layer-out wander ageless and unchanging through the centuries, accompanying the characters in childbirth and death. Maschik’s world is mythically charged and at the same time palpably real. She uses powerful, trenchant images, creates memorable scenes and has a firm grasp on her varied stylistic devices, including the lists interspersing the text, which order and structure the world. This is a debut that is both bold in form and original in language.