The Blindness of the Heart Julia Franck

The Blindness of the Heart Julia Franck

Overview:

Why would a mother abandon her seven-year-old son at a train station in 1945 Germany just as the fighting ends? In her powerful first novel to be translated into English, Franck poses the question before tracking back to the woman's WWI childhood. As the story progresses from one war to the next, Franck wrestles with a much broader question—why did so many Germans appear blind to the horrors on their horizon? 

Helene is the younger of two daughters of an Aryan father who survives the battlefield to die a pitiful death at home, and a Jewish mother who is something of a 20th-century Cassandra. The sisters flee rural life (and their mother) and are taken in by a relative in Berlin, where they are engulfed by the city's interwar debauchery. But as the economy deteriorates and the political situation heats up, Helene and her sister make do with fewer resources and dwindling freedoms. Helene finds love with a Jewish philosophy student, but succumbs, after a cruel twist, to another, colder man. Franck's insights are profound and alarming, and her storytelling makes the familiar material read fresh.
 
"The opening of Julia Frank's novel is among the most powerful in recent years, a narrative so assured that the reader is gripped...This is a great, big silence-breaker of a novel, a laser beam into the German darkness from a writer who, one feels, has a great deal more to say" (Norman Lebrecht Evening Standard)

"Franck's command of the language of misery and loss is awesome, but so is her gift for describing the warmth of burgeoning life when things are going right" (Melissa Katsoulis The Times)

"One of the most haunting works I have ever read about 20th century Germany...The book's moral perspective is faultless, as is Franck's sensitivity to character, sexuality and the struggle to be a free woman in a fascist society...The Blindness of the Heart is a masterpiece" (Julia Pascal The Independent)

"It is not surprising that this book won the German Book Prize... It is a rich moving and complex novel" (Allan Massie The Scotsman)

"Elegant novel ... Franck's great strength is her ability to place her characters in unenviable situations yet retain the reader's sympathy" (Gordon Darroch Herald)

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And Blessed Are The Ones Who Care For Their Fellow Men!