Remote Sympathy: LONGLISTED FOR THE WOMEN'S PRIZE FOR FICTION 2022: Catherine Chidgey

Product Information

As the prison population begins to rise, the job becomes ever more consuming. Corruption is rife at every level, the supplies are inadequate, and the sewerage system is under increasing strain. When Greta is diagnosed with cancer, the three characters are brought into conjunction. Hearing of Weber’s “miracle machine”, Dietrich offers him inducements to treat Greta: news of his wife and child; lighter duties that might keep him alive. As their lives and fates intersect, so too do their lies and self-deceits. Dietrich must conceal their arrangement; Greta must feign ignorance of her new doctor’s circumstances; Weber must offer hope for her survival, now inextricable from his own. When Frau Hahn is forced into an unlikely and poignant alliance with one of Buchenwald’s prisoners, Dr Lenard Weber, her naïve ignorance about what is going on so nearby is challenged. Buchenwald sorgeva a un passo da Weimar, il luogo culla della cultura tedesca (la quercia di Goethe, tanto per limitarsi a un solo aspetto) e con Dachau e Bergen-Belsen fu il maggior lager su suolo tedesco (i nazisti amavano ‘esportare’ anche i campi di concentramento).

Then there is SS officer Dietrich Hahn, based on a real-life Nazi officer, who gladly accepts a post at Buchenwald, complete with all the luxuries and perks his new position encompasses. His entries are written as post-war transcribed interviews and some of them were lifted verbatim from the real transcripts. Finally, there is his much younger wife Greta, who is ill with ovarian cancer and desperately needs treatment, even if the treatment is unproven. It is not a stretch to believe that metamorphically, she physically embodies the diseased Germany of the 1940s. Juxtaposed with these three narrators are short musings of the Weimar townspeople, written in third-person plural. When Frau Hahn is forced into an unlikely and poignant alliance with one of Buchenwald’s prisoners, Dr Lenard Weber, her naïve obtuseness about what is going on so close at hand around her is challenged.

A different perspective on the life surrounding and within the concentration camps, distressing at times to read but I found it interesting. Would make a good movie.

Lying just beyond the forest that surrounds them—so close and yet so remote—is the looming presence of a work camp. Frau Hahn’s husband, SS Sturmbannführer Dietrich Hahn, is to take up a powerful new position as the camp’s administrator. As the prison population begins to rise, the job becomes ever more consuming. Corruption is rife at every level, the supplies are inadequate, and the sewerage system is under increasing strain. The way she weaves different characters and point of views is commendable. Not at one point did I feel confused or questioning why the shift in narration. Together, the different viewpoints come together to create a feeling of being watched. From every angle, this story is told, albeit from different perspectives, but everyone has something to say. And every opinion and viewpoint is just as horrifying as the last. So Greta’s cancer can be seen as: the tumour of the camp set in this historically cultural town; the cancer of in German society or the poisonous growth in that society and in the town’s inhabitants that leads to their cognitive dissonance about the horrors occurring what it is effectively their sponsorship of the Nazi regime. Chidgey experiments with and opens up new structural territory for what contemporary fiction might be. Readers should be prepared to be challenged; equally, they should be prepared to be thrilled.”— New Zealand Herald (on The Beat of the Pendulum) Moving away from Munich isn’t nearly as wrenching an experience for Frau Greta Hahn as she had feared. Their new home is even lovelier than the one they left behind, and best of all – right on their doorstep – are some of the finest craftsmen from all over Europe, prepared to make for her and the other officers’ wives living in this small community anything they could possibly desire: new curtains from the finest silks, furniture designed to the most exacting specifications, execute a fresco or a mural even.Out on a walk, Greta and her five-year-old son see a man shot and roughly removed on a stretcher. A guard blithely explains that the victim had stolen a carrot. But any reaction by Greta to the reality is obscured by her increasing pain from a worsening illness. The descriptive writing in this book is absolutely fantastic. I was always taught that descriptive writing needed to show the reader the scene so that they could see it for themselves but the description in this book is so detailed that you actually feel like you are there. What I found remarkable about this book was the way that the writer has even made some of the Nazi characters likable and it is unusual that in a book we should see their point of view about what was going on and she beautifully links lives that are on different ends of the Nazi atrocities. La parte di bosco tagliata per lasciare spazio al campo era in collina, in cima a un’altura. Di conseguenza, lassù, su quella collina, o meglio, sotto quella collina, sono rimasti in tanti a dormire, sepolti in qualche modo, ridotti in cenere, o fumo attraverso il camino.