Child of All Nations by Irmgard Keun
Friday, 22 Feb 2008 18:03
An insight into pre-war Europe through the eyes of a child.
Penguin Classics, hardback, £14.99, translated with an afterword by Michael Hofmann, published February 7th.
In a nutshell
A child's view of Europe on the brink of war
What's it all about?
Child of All Nations is told through the eyes of Kully, a nine-year-old German emigre, travelling through 1930's Europe with her mother and father as the threat of war hangs ominously close. Her father is an exiled writer, a temperamental husband and father, a dreamer and an alcoholic. Roaming from country to country, the story follows the family as their visas expire, money runs out and willing friends become few and far between
Though she does not go to school, Kully knows more than most children her age. She knows how to roll a cigarette and peel prawns and she knows you need a visa to enter a country. She even knows how to lie, which she does unthinkingly for her father when his publisher comes demanding his unfinished novel.
Kully and her long-suffering mother are left behind in hotels in various cities as their father heads off to try to find work, or more usually to try to find another "friend" he can convince to lend him money. From Kully's peripheral view of the pivotal events occurring across Europe, we hear of figures such as Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini, but they are mentioned as mere background to the search for the next meal or the tiresome wait for Kully's vivacious yet unreliable father to return.
Who's it by?
Written by Berlin-born Irmgard Keun, the life of the author mirrors that of her protagonists. As an exiled writer, Keun and her lover, the poet Joseph Roth, travelled through Europe from 1936 to1938. Through her portrayal of modern young women in her early novels, Keun earned the wrath of the Nazi party for such "immoral" depictions and was forced to flee Germany. Yet after the death of Roth in 1939, Keun returned to Germany, living semi-illegally under an assumed name. Her later works after the war gained a new following among a younger generation of feminists.
Michael Hofmann's translation sees Child Of All Nations brought to an English audience for the first time. As well as being the author of his own poetry and criticism, he has previously translated many of Joseph Roth's works. Though denied by Keun, Hofmann remarks in his afterword how the character of Kully's father with "the generosity, the scrounging, the panache, the drinking, the odd mixture of unreliability and dependability", is thought to be based on Roth.
As an example?
"I get funny looks from hotel managers, but that's not because I'm naughty; it's the fault of my father. Everyone says: that man ought never to have got married.
"At first they treat me like a rich lay's Pekinese... But all that comes to an end when my father has to leave to raise money, and my mother and me are left behind as surety, and my father says we've got as much riding on us as if we'd been fur coats or diamonds."
What the others say...
"This enchanting novella is written by the woman who travelled at the side of Joseph Roth, the Austrian Jewish genius, from 1936 until his death in May 1939. Irmgard Keun was a best-selling novelist herself, and as much banned from publication by the Nazis as Roth was." - Elaine Feinstein in The Times
"Kully displays the desire to understand, the flexibility to accommodate and the propensity to question; all of which makes her perfect for the world of the literary exile: hers is a justly peripheral view of a peripheral condition. She is, of course, far and away the oldest and wisest character in the book - her mother's keeper, her father's agent." - Michael Hofmann writing in his afterword and in the Guardian:
Likelihood of becoming a Hollywood blockbuster?
This isn't a book that would work well on the big screen. The beauty of it is in the writing and the observations of the child at its centre. More a book to win a literary prize than a screenplay nomination.
So is it any good?
Hofmann's translation enables the accessing of a tale full of a child's idiosyncratic wonder at the world. This isn't a story in the conventional sense of their being a "beginning", "middle" and "end"; it is an insight into the experience of an exile existing in 1930's Europe. The lack of coherent structure is apt for the subject matter – there is a sense of advancing in time without ever actually moving forward. Kully and her family roam Europe and eventually America, but there is no sense of purpose, except to exist and to keep up the facade of a bourgeois lifestyle when there is no money to pay the mounting hotel bills.
Seen through the eyes of a child, we share her experience of trying to make sense of the world, with her wise understanding of visas and borders and her naive understanding of relationships and war. At times funny, at times poignant, the use of a child narrator enables the reader to see a near-shattered world through still innocent eyes. Written before the second world war, in 1938, to modern readers the knowledge of what is to come makes the observations and experiences of Kully even more loaded.
Initially disappointing that there is no climax with which the book ends, the ending, or lack of it, seems entirely appropriate to the cyclical nature of the characters' journey. Reading the novel with a 21st century view of the events that were to unfold following the publication of this novel, the open ending appears even more reflective of the time. In an ominous time where few certainties could be given, we leave Kully and her father and mother in much the same situation that we first met them, though the threat of war is ever closer.
8/10
Nova Maxwell
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