As I was taking the cows to pasture, a policeman came and hung me from the walnut tree.
Books by poets are always more about sound than anything else to me. Maja Haderlap is a poet; I can tell even in translation from German. Angel of Oblivion is all sound, rhythm, cadence. But then it’s transient too. We can float only until we realize that not much happens in a book of sound.
There are stories. Our narrator grows up, a Carinthian Slovene in Austria, within sight of the Yugoslav border. Post-war, her community is a melting pot of troubles, othered by the German-speaking Austrians for their Slovenian dialect and their group’s partisan resistance of the Nazis (and hence any collaborating Austrians) during the Second World War. Everyone is troubled. The traumas of the older generation (concentration camp survivors, PTSD suffering former partisans, torture victims) leech into the lives of the young. You can think of it like genetic memory. You can think of it like poison from both nature and nurture.
And they tell stories. The partisans meet again and again as our narrator grows to tell their stories again and again. Nothing is forgotten. Nothing is let go. Poems smuggled out of Auschwitz published in minority Slovenian Austrian journals. Who betrayed whom. Who fought valiantly. Who was taken. Who survived. Who didn’t. Telling ourselves stories in order to live.
Our narrator goes to Bled, as we all should do. Here’s a photo I took there.
Rhythm, sound, fragments. Don’t forget, but don’t expect a linear plot line and a traditional story either.
Angel of Oblivion by Maja Haderlap went on sale August 16, 2016.
I received a copy free from Netgalley in exchange for an honest review.