_The Vanishing of Katharina Linden_ Responses #1 and #2

I decided to take a break from Proust and the Squid this week to read more fiction.  Nick recommended his summer reading book, Helen Grant's The Vanishing of Katharina Linden.  Described on the cover as a "strange, haunting modern fairy tale," VKL takes place in a small (real) German town called Bad Münstereifel.  The novel is narrated by 11-year-old Pia Kolvenbach, whose grandmother's recent dramatic death has made her a town pariah.  When one of Pia's classmates disappears, she and her friend Stefan attempt to figure out the mystery by learning about the town's folklore and ghost stories from their elderly friend Herr Schiller and conducting their own investigation.

I really enjoyed this book, though the mystery part, the main plot line, was my least favorite part.  Frankly, I loved the German-ness of the whole thing.  I studied German and German literature in college, and spent a summer living in Munich and traveling around Bavaria.  Grant, who is British, decided to write the novel while she was living in Bad Münstereifel.  She works in a lot of German words and sayings (there's a glossary at the back), which I really enjoyed, and bilingual Pia (whose mother is British) examines some of the more interesting words.  I also found the descriptions of setting to be very true to my experiences of German towns.  I've never been to Bad Münstereifel, but the descriptions really reminded me of the Bavarian towns of Berchtesgaden and Königsee.  It helped to be able to see the buildings and streets in my head and to know a little bit about the traditions that were mentioned in the novel.

What I liked most about this book was the way it used creepy folklore.  Fairy tales are a major part of German folklore (the Grimms' tales were all collected in Germany), and many of those stories are actually very dark, though the Disney versions may not make it seem that way.  Pia learns about the town's folklore traditions of ghosts, witches, shape shifters, and burning men, and Grant works them in in really interesting ways.  The book in this way reminded me a lot of Freud's essay on "The Uncanny" (das Unheimlich), a particular sense of literary creepiness that he argues is connected to repetition of details and dark secrets being revealed.  The book taps this sense of the uncanny that is key to German literature and that also reminds me of my time in Germany.

Grant's choice of narrator was interesting.  At first, I was not all that impressed to read another story about a little girl solving a town murder mystery - to me, that's an old and done story.  But Pia is more complicated than that.  Her relationship to the story, because of her grandmother's death and the way the town connected her to later tragedies, makes her somewhat unreliable.  Also, she is very clearly eleven.  She has little fantasies of being the one to solve the mystery, and it is clear that these fantasies motivate her more than justice or concern about her classmates.  She and Stefan make (and miss) hilarious connections and have no ability to discriminate between possible scenarios of what happened.  They use the folklore of their town, but they also rely on random horror movies to generate theories.  They are actually kids most of the time, and I like the way that Grant plays with this genre.