{"id":7516,"date":"2017-09-11T11:44:32","date_gmt":"2017-09-11T11:44:32","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/bookoxygen.com\/?p=7516"},"modified":"2017-09-14T11:23:58","modified_gmt":"2017-09-14T11:23:58","slug":"dance-by-the-canal-by-kerstin-hensel","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/bookoxygen.com\/?p=7516","title":{"rendered":"Dance by the Canal by Kerstin Hensel"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>Translated by Jen Calleja<\/strong><\/p>\n

Published by Peirene Press 18 September 2017<\/strong><\/p>\n

128pp, paperback, \u00a312.00<\/strong><\/p>\n

Reviewed by Alison Burns<\/strong><\/p>\n

Click here to buy this book<\/a><\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n

Early in this short, sharp novella set in East Germany, the narrator describes her privileged, protected, pressurized childhood, when there was \u2018goose liver pate on the table and Mozart on the record player\u2019. In the garden of her parents\u2019 villa, she played unsteady solo hopscotch until she \u2018fell by the wayside\u2019.<\/p>\n

The wider sense of falling by the wayside lies at the heart of her story.<\/p>\n

Lessing Prize winner Kerstin Hensel\u2019s book, first published in 1994 (the year in which it is set), introduces us to a homeless young woman, Gabriela, who sleeps under a canal bridge. Gabriela eats, washes and gets clothes at a shelter. She scavenges mainly for things to write on – anything from abandoned food-wrappers to packing paper. In her story, she is proud and defiant, distinguishing herself from most other down-and-outs because: \u2018They don\u2019t know how to tell their story. They\u2019ve just fallen. Right to the bottom.\u2019\u00a0 However, throughout the narrative – which moves from the present to the past and back again – she refers to her dread of awakening: \u2018Anything but that, anything but the fear of seeing myself.\u2019\u00a0 So she has fallen, all right, if not to the bottom.<\/p>\n

When the story of Gabriela\u2019s childhood opens, her father is a respected vascular surgeon. At school, she is deemed to be from the intelligentsia and thus, according to one of the teachers, \u2018a bourgeois relic\u2019.\u00a0 Her mainly working-class schoolfellows laugh at her, until she joins forces with dirty Katke, who is up for truanting by the canal and fooling around generally.\u00a0 It is as well that Gabriela has a friend and some escape from home, for hers is not a happy one.\u00a0 There is a brief period, after her father\u2019s promotion to Senior Medical Officer, when the house is full of distinguished doctors, writers and artists; but her father is a drunk, hooked on prestige, and he loses his position.\u00a0 Her mother eventually takes an amusing young actor for her lover, and gets a divorce.<\/p>\n

Gabriela moves with her father into a small flat and everything goes downhill from there, for both of them.\u00a0 She fails at school, is miserable at home, takes refuge in reading and then is sent to an industrial plant as an apprentice mechanical engineer (secondary and tertiary education being reserved for the workers). He eventually leaves home, too.<\/p>\n

By the time we first meet Gabriela, her world has shrunk to the canal, the park, the homeless shelter, the seasons and the bar.\u00a0 This young woman, who was assaulted by her piano teacher at the age of five, is raped in that park and gets no sympathy from the police; but still she fights back.\u00a0 When, even at the shelter, she notices \u2018a pitying shake of the head\u2019, her response is: \u2018But I know who I am.\u2019\u00a0 What we don\u2019t know yet is that she ran away from the industrial plant and, for punishment, was signed up as an informer: another role that she managed to evade.<\/p>\n

Here, in Leibnitz, in 1994, under her canal bridge, she has made a life for herself, if only to be left in peace for long enough to record it.\u00a0 Her \u2018salvation\u2019, if that is what it is, comes from two unlikely directions, which I won\u2019t spoil for the reader.<\/p>\n

This is another extraordinarily powerful tale from the Peirene fountain: a somewhat uncomfortable read, but full of food for thought.\u00a0 Die Zeit <\/em>acclaimed this work, with reason, as \u2018thirty years of East German history narrated with laconic irony\u2019.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Reviewed by Alison Burns<\/p>\n

Lessing Prize winner Kerstin Hensel\u2019s book, first published in 1994 (the year in which it is set), introduces us to a homeless young woman, Gabriela, who sleeps under a canal bridge. Gabriela eats, washes and gets clothes at a shelter. She scavenges mainly for things to write on – anything from abandoned food-wrappers to packing paper. In her story, she is proud and defiant, distinguishing herself from most other down-and-outs because: \u2018They don\u2019t know how to tell their story. They\u2019ve just fallen. Right to the bottom.\u2019 […] in Reviews<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[18,19,17],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-7516","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-new-fiction-and-non-fiction","category-notable-books","category-reviews"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/bookoxygen.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7516","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/bookoxygen.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/bookoxygen.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bookoxygen.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bookoxygen.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=7516"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/bookoxygen.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7516\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":7564,"href":"https:\/\/bookoxygen.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7516\/revisions\/7564"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/bookoxygen.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=7516"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bookoxygen.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=7516"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bookoxygen.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=7516"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}