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Twentieth-Century Gothic
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18930 |
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BOOK WORLD
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| Issue
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2 / 1991 |
4,295 Words |
| Author
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Marilyn Sibley Fries
Marilyn Sibley Fries is associate professor of German
literature and women's studies at the University of Michigan
in Ann Arbor. She is author of The Changing Consciousness of
Reality: The Image of Berlin in Selected German Novels from
Raabe to Doblin and editor of Responses to Christa Wolf:
Critical Essays. Her current research deals with strategies of
narrating the homeland in contemporary German Fiction. |
LOST WEDDINGS
Maria Beig, translated from the German by Peter Blickle and Jaimy Gordon
New York: Persea Books, 1990
143 pp., $17.95 (hardcover)
The image is such a cozy one: An aging woman, retired from her position as knitting teacher, abandons needles for pen in her late years and turns to writing. Now that her child has grown and left the household, the quill becomes a way to feather an empty nest. In another time such writing activity might have been described as "scribbling" and paid no further heed, for Maria Beig's subjects are women who are not exemplary, whose deeds are not heroic.
A chronicler of a specific time and place, she tells not of the momentous events that have destroyed, divided, and condemned her country but rather of what she knows: the rural life of southern Germany and its people as they make their way through the twentieth century. In the process, this seventy-year old "prodigy," whose first book (Rabenkrachzen, 1982) appeared when she was sixty-two and has to date been followed by six more, has achieved remarkable visibility in Germany. Many have hailed her works as a respite from the familiar style and preoccupations of other German writers: Beig arrives on the literary scene with something completely new--a remarkable and unprecedented style that is evidently indebted to no literary predecessors or influences, and for which the literary establishment vainly seeks an apt modifier.
Beig's "discoverer" and promoter, the novelist Martin Walser, describes her work as "chronicle-style," while another critic opts for "testimonial." It is, quite simply, storytelling of the kind that abjures all preemptive narrative gesturing, instead leaving the analysis and the question of meaning entirely up to the reader or hearer of the tale. And this, in today's literary world, is a rarity indeed. By others, most particularly her family, acquaintances, and natives of Beig's local area--the region near Lake Constance that they refer to as "paradise"--she has been vilified and banished as a traitor. Her sisters refuse to speak to her, and the brother who still owns the family homestead has forbidden her to enter the village or home of her youth.
Both of these reactions, the positive as well as the negative, reveal in their extremity as much about the readers as about the writer of the tale. Beig touches areas of particular sensitivity to her German audience by virtue of what one might
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