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3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
THUNDER MADE FROM DIAMONDS, April 29, 2011
This review is from: Child of All Nations: A Novel (Paperback)
Kully is a bit the dissembler when she is not busy being our lens on the fragile, unstable world of 1938. Irmgard Keun tips us off early on, so that we may at least have some chance not to fall entirely in her thrall. She says she secretly practiced on the typewriter, but it broke only after she did. The main point of course is that she is already following in several sets of footsteps, three at the very least, playing at being grown up as children do. But with that crucial twist of prevarication, like lemon rind in a perfect Martini. She is something of her father's daughter. Though she cannot speak French, really, the restaurant staff take her for French. Keun, as she often does, cuts both ways here. Kully is made up to speak Koelsch, just enough to make her a touch alien to mainstream Germany of the day. By the same token, she carries the day by using her language facility to put one over on the common crowd. By such devices and many more, Keun shows she is a far more developed and capable writer of true literature than her older fellow traveler, Joseph Roth. She has his journalist's eye to some extent, but with artistic sophistications he had no truck with. Kully is already darkly realistic even as she retains some of the naïf child. She knows the puppy she covets must belong to an attentive owner because everything cute does. Only mother nature herself keeps Kully in check, looming large. Womanhood, still a little ways off, also looms. She anticipates change as an alien invasion of her perfectly functioning body, though she grants that boys are to keep you warm. Not a little stubborn, she rejects puberty as inevitable. Keun has set up as many inner balances and tensions as external ones. Thus she broadens and intensifies the novel at once. In her world, it is the living and not the dead that stink. Again, only nature spoils the notion with dead snails. As if anticipating Olivier as Crassus, her father at once enjoys both snails and oysters. Kully cannot know Barbarossa is not the long beard but the red one. She cannot yet connect the imprisonment of writers with learning to write. She disconnects and wonders why any German children would still be taught to write if all one does is to jail them. Keun's obscure irony is that Kully is actually right, but on a level that is for now above her understanding. Yet she hashes the Bible in a nonce. The Bible is all borders; Kully points out nothing is said of borders - heaven, hell, the Garden, Zion, and not a word on passports or visas. Not much use as a guide these days. Everybody seems to think her father is just a deadbeat, a panhandling drunk. Keun knows better herself. She forces you to think unless you opt out and relegate everything to a precocious child in odd circumstances. Look at his path. Then try to tell yourself his travail through countries is that of the errant bum. So much is said by mentioning that one town, Lvov. A visa is like a dying animal, expiring over time. She is not afraid of the dull authority figures in uniforms. It is those without them that do the real damage. She says "I like the red light better. So I do what I am warned against." And, "When my father has money {that I can see} he always gives it to other people who need it. She loves him for good reasons and looks away from the bad. She thinks it is not allowed to cook people. Keun is calling attention to the reality through Kully's denial. Her use of occultation is a special, subtle sort of irony, especially when she places the device in the strong hands of a child. This utterance is not lost on her father, who knows that nowadays any sort of atrocity is possible. From the doll's kitchen to the charnel house turned factory, it is a short walk. Kully is chided by the goofy Fraulein Brouwer for not naming her tortoises, as a sign she has not her father's imagination. She is accused of lacking "that wonderful childish imagination." This ridiculous lady of the bird's nest is saying that it is Kully's ideas that are silly. Keun knows that writing, especially in her world, is a dark occupation. But Kully is a powerful fresnel for her lamp. And she uses the father to voice on that very darkness. Again, Keun has him say it by what it is not. He is not a plein air poet; unlike those painters, he cannot sit on a bench on a windy promontory and write an ode to the beautiful view. No criminal betrayal of duty. In Amsterdam, Kully knows by nots - the orange flags are not for their less than grand arrival. She delights in taking Herr Krabbe's seemingly free dish of nuts, that exact their price in glasses of Bols. Keun amplifies this volley onto banter between them over the writing of novels by little girls. He's agin it. Kully has a super nose. She can smell the plums from the essence of the slivovitz, and the violets, and her father. Nothing is at once so immediate yet ineffable as smell. Even music is mediated vibration while smell is the impact of the molecules themselves on their receptors. No artifice, nothing but the eternal now of nose. Even old age does not dull, as it does eyes and ears. Who says, wake up and look at the coffee? Only the venal pursuits of the world distract and repress smell. What is more venal than war? Keun knew by 1938 it was coming. Hope is just a waste of time and energy. Out in the street mother hears the coming horror in the Horst Wessel Song. Ten dollars was better than a thousand marks. And newspapers worthless hawkers of the tawdry and the sensational, while truth was hidden, ignored, forgotten and just outright prohibited. Deep truths spring like weeds along the book. A man that does not kiss the hands of other women will not kiss the feet of his wife. Death and life are threads throughout this book - snails, people, mutton chops, or the very books. Life is tenuous and has no absolute value. Suicide can be sensible. Kully is conscious of herself as émigré, unwanted and thereby a child without a country. Death is close, even in food, and smells of low tide when all is open and visible. Keun even gets New York right. The hotel drugstore, in room radio with noisy air conditioner. America is the right prop for her extended fantasy sequence, nearly a stream of consciousness. Parking machines become slot machines. And why not? You win nearly as often. She imagines you could run over a soda fountain as easily as a fire hydrant. Sounds plausible enough. But then she is still clear eyed enough to pick up on the provincial American isolationism (which only now do I kind of miss, in a very certain way). The lingering American obsequious awe for the British Pound Sterling. And the lingering hold of the civil war. (I suspect she confused the Delaware river with Chesapeake Bay, perhaps from the old Washington yarn.) You learn a lot about a writer the way she handes a section like the America journey. Her literary instincts serve her well. Horse shoe crabs and Coca-Cola. ABC stores and dry counties. A thirsty man tricked by that shrimp cocktail. Keun was in America nearly as long as DeToqueville, and saw almost as little as he but she got a much better grasp than he even hoped to fake. In the end she proves something of a softie, as Kully is permitted that greatest of gifts, to be homesick for the whole wide world. Who says this book has no plot. In the end, Kully is the child of all nations. A triumph for her, for Keun, and for all of us even now.
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3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
A child's perspective..., April 28, 2011
This review is from: Child of All Nations: A Novel (Paperback)
Ten-year old Kully is an unusual girl and she tells her story in a curious, conversational way. Combining childlike naiveté and playful innocence with an exceptionally astute ability for observation and deduction, she interprets and records life around her as she sees it. Irmgard Keun uses a young girl's point of view with great skill to portray a reality that may have been too painful to address in depth through an adult voice. This way, Kully's limited yet realistic perception of traumatic daily life of an émigré family on the run to escape German authorities, allows the author to keep a hopeful and optimistic tone in her descriptions of circumstances and people. Whether Kully expresses her deep love for her parents, comments on her parents' political and financial woes or describes her physical surroundings in the hotels where she stays, her sharp-witted comments make you laugh and cry at the same time. Reading this brief intense novel now, more than seventy years after it was first published in 1938, we can place the girl and her story into a broader historical context. With hindsight, we can read between the lines, finish her sentences and re-interpret her thoughts and shake our head in wonder how she and her family even managed to survive. Rarely have I heard a ten-year old speak so much and in such apparently light-hearted way about death, lack of money, alcoholism or homelessness. Kully feels happiest when traveling with both her parents on a train between destinations on their constant escape from creditors or border controls. Too often, she stays behind with her mother while her father is off to another "project" to raise money, sell one of his book manuscripts or at least an article... or give in to his many weaknesses. They stay in the best hotels in the Capitals of Europe and usually have to overstay their welcome because there is no money to pay the bill. Her father, writer with strong political views that forced them to leave Germany, is the most generous person who, as soon as he has a few pieces of money, invites his friends or helps them out. Her beautiful mother, Kully notes, is reluctant to ask for advances from the various friends, publishers or admirers. Somehow, however, money always turns up at the last minute. Irmgard Keun was a very popular German author in the early thirties. Her second novel, The The Artificial Silk Girlwas a huge success in Germany when it was published in 1932 and immediately translated into English. However, already in 1933, her books were banned and destroyed and she left Germany in 1935 and did not return, under false identity, until 1940. Prior to this novel the author published in 1937 Nach Mitternacht (AFTER MIDNIGHT) that will be available in English for the first time in May 2011, translated by the excellent Anthea Bell. It is an 'adult' look at life of simple people under Nazi rule. Among more recent novels two *) come to my mind that are narrated also from a child's perspective, and, interestingly, describe the child's family and their life under a totalitarian regime. In particular, Jenny Erpenbeck's The Book of Words (New Directions Paperbook) shows certain parallels in language and tone in which the child interprets and misinterprets what it sees or hears, such as, for example comparing gun fire with "exploding tires". A CHILD OF ALL NATIONS is, for me at least, still a very worthy, if somewhat irreverent and highly unusual, voice to highlight the precarious fate of refugees and émigrés, escaping from Nazi Germany in the mid-thirties. *) Jenny Erpenbeck, BOOK OF WORDS (2004/2007) Marcelo Figueras, KAMCHATKA (2004/2011)
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3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
"Except Ye See as a Little Child ..., March 11, 2010
... ye shall not realize the absurdity of most matters in life." That's the commonest rationale for anyone to write a whole book in 'first person' narrative from the point of view of a child, to reveal the inanity and insanity of the adult world. And when that "adult world" is Europe in the 1930s, amid economic stagnation, the rise of fascism, and the impending catastrophe of persecution of Jews and others, there's so much insanity to reveal that even a child can fathom the horror of it. This "Child of All Nations" is Kully, a nine-year-old girl from Köln who starts her narrative in 1936 in a hotel in Ostende, where she and her mother are waiting for her 'famous writer' father to return from Prague with enough money to pay their hotel bill and redeem his family from hostagedom. The family has just escaped into exile from Hitlerian Germany, and Kully still speaks only the Köln dialect of Deutsch. By the end of the book, the girl will be conversant in French, Italian, Polish, several dialects of German, and English. Kully is indisputably precocious, as slyly resourceful as any kid in an American 'Home Alone' film. She's also amusingly naive at times. She understands some things one might not expect a nine-year-old to understand; at the same time, she 'intuits' the meaning of some things in ways that are bizarrely apropos despite being utterly wrong from an adult viewpoint. Kully's "voice" is remarkably convincing most of the time, or at least as much off the time as her author/creator wants it to be. But since Kully exists really as a spokesperson for poignant satire, one does need to make allowances for bits of wry insouciance here and there. When the child's perspective is altogether too narrow, the author is ever ready with an adult conversation quoted verbatim or a letter from Father, which Kully has opened secretly. All one learns directly from Kully about the political and economic crises around her is that Fear is universal and that adult despair seems overwhelming. Kully's narrative has no plot -- no beginning or ending -- as she is dragged from hotel to hotel, to Poland, Italy, Netherlands, France, eventually to America, to Virginia Beach VA, and back to Amsterdam. Kully develops an odd concept of the nation state and the borders thereof; she and her parents are always on the edge of expulsion from one country, for lack of visas, yet unwelcome in any other. Kully hopes to find a 'border' wide enough to let her mother and herself just plant themselves between hostile states. Kully's father is the "moving" force in her narrative... "moving" in both senses. His leftist writings have made his life decidedly perilous in Hitler's Germany, but how can a writer of German words support himself elsewhere? Besides, he's a man near collapse, frightened out of his wits at his prescience of the impending catastrophe of war, as well as quickly degenerating, a 'charming' drunk who sometimes remembers to feed his family by begging and borrowing shamelessly, cadging advances from stingy publishers for books less than half written. Father's life is a runaway booze-wagon plunging toward a precipice; Mother is the hapless maiden bound and tied to that wagon. And the whole chase never quite disheartens Kully, in part because she takes it for granted and in part because her own childish 'joy of life' makes an adventure of every pratfall. Kully's world is an outlandish, surreally comical place. Irmgard Keun had been briefly a 'best-selling' novelist in the Germany of the early '30s, but by 1936 her books had already been banned as 'decadent' by the Third Reich. From '36 to '38, she was the lover/companion of the Austrian Jewish journalist/novelist Joseph Roth, himself already in exile in France, penniless and rapidly destroying himself with alcohol. In fact, he died in '39. "Child of All Nations" was published in '38, so it must have been written during or just at the close of Keun's relationship with Roth. Hardly anyone has ever read this book without supposing that Kully's Father is a depiction of Roth. If so, it's certainly not an idolatrous depiction. The Father/Writer is manic, boozy, cagey, self-centered, a horrible mate and father nonetheless desperately loved. It's obvious that he'll never pull himself together or write anything more of value. Oddly enough, the real-life Roth wrote one of his deepest and most polished novellas - The Legend of the Holy Drinker - in his last paroxysms of self-destruction. But if Father is Joseph Roth, who is Kully and who is her Mother? Roth and Keun did not have a child and were together unmarried only two years. I have a curious intuition that both Mother and Daughter are the author herself. That is, that Keun chose to reveal herself as a child, a wise innocent, in relation to Roth, who must have been a holy terror to live with. In other words, the "child' is a mask, which allows the author to disguise her harshest criticisms in clever naivete. This is a great little book! Read it for laughs! It is funny. Read it for sorrow! It is full of anguish. Or read it for insight! Kully's misunderstandings and cock-eyed insights compel the reader to experience the chaos of the 1930s as a child would have, without the benefit of historical hindsight. But don't forget to read Joseph Roth also! Roth was one of the giants of 20th C literature and one of the sharpest observers of his doomed society.
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