words
Memoirs—such a hot genre in the current book biz that a certain James Frey was willing to pass off fiction as fact in his notorious A Million Little Pieces—tend to come in two forms: 1) dramatic personal events that demand expression, and 2) ordinary personal events made dramatic through description and analysis.
 Beatrix Ost recounts her life during wartime in her memoir My Father’s House. |
What’s interesting about part-time Charlottesville resident Beatrix Ost’s memoir My Father’s House, published in Germany in 2004 and recently translated by the author with Jonathan McVity, is how it essentially straddles those two subgenres. The book concerns Ost’s childhood in wartime rural Bavaria—a situation rife with drama (such as American planes strafing her as she walked home from school), but more often than not affecting her in a cursory, or purely psychological, way (how much, for instance, could her young mind grasp of her father’s narrow escape from court martial for defeatism?). This is no World War II soldier’s memoir, in other words, and yet it proves that into one colossal event there are many entrances.
While the memoir walks a fine line, it leans toward the second subgenre. The reader’s interest is largely dependent on Ost’s presentation. Local writer John Casey, in his back-cover blurb, calls the memoir “a gorgeous book.” (Is there a link between this comment and, um, Ost thanking Casey in her acknowledgments for “his fruitful private writing lessons”? Oh, the sometimes amusing world of writers-supporting-other-writers…) Casey’s pronouncement bears the stamp of truth mainly because of Ost’s wealth of detail, which springs from both her keen memory and her artistic patience.
One chapter opens, for instance, with an extended description of her grandfather’s smoker’s ritual: “He probed the lower pockets of his jacket with his long, slender fingers—Ah, there it is, my tobacco—then drew out a pouch. Actually it was a wooden toad, an antiquity from China, with a frog sitting on it as a lid. A wonderfully polished ivory pug hung from a cord as weight.” The passage, which continues for several more sentences, accentuates the humanity at the still, small center of a maelstrom. In another chapter, Ost shows us natural innocence warring with war by detailing how the family adopted a stray doe.
It’s not clear how the process of translation may have contributed to Ost’s at times powerless writing style. For every deft turn of phrase there’s a cliché, such as “the news traveled through the house like wildfire,” and “sirens from the city sliced through the day like a knife,” or a feeble attempt at originality, such as: “Like Superman, we overcome time and space.”
But this quibble shouldn’t deter readers looking for the next good memoir to satisfy their fix.
