So I was plugging away on David Simon's Homicide when I had my baby three weeks early! With my baby's early arrival, I jumped into a cycle of much breastfeeding and little sleep, which also meant much watching of Netflix during feedings. In addition to the American version of The Office and Dexter, I resumed watching episodes of Homicide, which meant that, to the extent I have had any reading time, I haven't wanted to read Homicide in addition to watching it.
Luckily, right before I went into labor, I had checked out Anna Winger's This Must Be The Place. I'm a sucker for novels about expatriates, so when I saw the Times' review of this debut novel, it went right on my list. It's a story of two lonely souls living in the same Berlin apartment building. Hope is an American expat who followed her husband, an economist, to Berlin in the wake of both a miscarriage and 9/11. Walter is a washed-up German actor who makes his living dubbing Tom Cruise movies. The novel chronicles both the development of their friendship and their individual steps towards understanding themselves and their places in the world.
Having been an expat (although not in Berlin) many things about Hope's experience rang true to me -- but one important thing did not. Hope allegedly shut out almost everyone in her life following her miscarriage, and then decided to follow her husband to Germany. Yet she seems curiously unruffled by the fact that he spends the entire week in Poland working on his project and returns only on weekends, without much communication. The idea that this set-up would be acceptable to her -- or even that her husband would ask her to submit to it, given that she had just endured a miscarriage -- was totally implausible to me. Interestingly, given that it seems that Hope may have been modeled at least partially on the author's experience (she's a writer living in Berlin with her family, and in her acknowledgments actually mentions the other mothers she met in a park that she refers to in the novel), I found Walter's character to be much more believeable. His stasis was much more realistic, and his exploration of his idenity, background, and proper place in the world felt much more organic.
(I am self-aware enough to recognize that it was probably not a great time for me to be reading a novel structured, in part, around a miscarriage. It's entirely possible that I created some distance from Hope's character because I really couldn't allow myself to empathize with her while my three day-old child was hiccuping in a bassinet next to me. So if the novel sounds intriguing to you, you might want to take my criticism of Hope's character with a dash of salt.)
There is a third protagonist in the novel: Berlin. Anna and Walter's Berlin is not the touristy land of the Wall and Potsdamer Platz (although both are mentioned) but a residential, multi-layered Berlin, and their discussions of Berlin's history and evolution are fascinating.
I'll probably read some more Homicide today (on breaks from feeding!), and tomorrow a friend is bringing over Man Gone Down.
If you like Homicide, you should check out Simon's other book, "The Corner". It might be out of print, but I have a copy.
Posted by: Uppitychinaman | 07/22/2009 at 10:51 AM
Oh, this is BC from CFR by the way.
Posted by: Uppitychinaman | 07/22/2009 at 10:51 AM