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Reading: A Small Person Far Away
Mar. 6th, 2016 04:55 pmA Small Person Far Away is the third in Judith Kerr's trilogy of autobiographical novels, following When Hitler Stole Pink Rabbit, which I have read a great many times, and Bombs on Aunt Dainty, which I had definitely read at least once before re-reading it last summer. I don't think I had ever read A Small Person Far Away before, though.
In this book, Anna (Kerr's fictionalised version of herself) is grown up, recently married and living in London. It's 1956 and the hardships of the war are behind her. Unlike the previous novels, each of which spanned several years of Anna's life, A Small Person Far Away takes place across the space of a week, as Anna travels to West Berlin to be with her mother, who is in hospital after taking an overdose, against a backdrop of the escalating Suez crisis and the Hungarian uprising.
Like the two earlier novels, A Small Person Far Away may have been written for children but it isn't afraid to tackle difficult and uncomfortable subjects, both on the political level (the aftermath of World War 2, the fear of World War 3, the fractured lives of the Jewish refugees who have returned to Berlin and are still counting what they have lost) and the personal (the suicide of Anna's father, eight years before the action of the novel, her mother's depression, the complicated relationships between Anna, her brother and her mother, tied together by a shared experience that no-one else can fully comprehend and yet all trying to build their own lives in the postwar world). It was, perhaps, an ironic choice of reading material for Mothers' Day. It made me cry several times. It concludes a trilogy of novels which are about survival, and how love binds people together and helps them get through things which seem impossible, and about how being a grown-up means facing fear and doubt and the loss of certainty but still trying to face the future together.
Reading Nick Hunt's book, I mentioned feeling a sense of "the End of Civilisation is imminent"; Judith Kerr reminds me that, as Hunt should jolly well have known, for the people in the countries he was walking through civilisation ended several times in the years between Patrick Leigh Fermor's walk and his, and actually, a lot of people made it through to the other side of the end of their world, in some cases only to be confronted by the end of the new world as well, and still kept on going. It's a short book, but it contains a lot of wisdom.
In this book, Anna (Kerr's fictionalised version of herself) is grown up, recently married and living in London. It's 1956 and the hardships of the war are behind her. Unlike the previous novels, each of which spanned several years of Anna's life, A Small Person Far Away takes place across the space of a week, as Anna travels to West Berlin to be with her mother, who is in hospital after taking an overdose, against a backdrop of the escalating Suez crisis and the Hungarian uprising.
Like the two earlier novels, A Small Person Far Away may have been written for children but it isn't afraid to tackle difficult and uncomfortable subjects, both on the political level (the aftermath of World War 2, the fear of World War 3, the fractured lives of the Jewish refugees who have returned to Berlin and are still counting what they have lost) and the personal (the suicide of Anna's father, eight years before the action of the novel, her mother's depression, the complicated relationships between Anna, her brother and her mother, tied together by a shared experience that no-one else can fully comprehend and yet all trying to build their own lives in the postwar world). It was, perhaps, an ironic choice of reading material for Mothers' Day. It made me cry several times. It concludes a trilogy of novels which are about survival, and how love binds people together and helps them get through things which seem impossible, and about how being a grown-up means facing fear and doubt and the loss of certainty but still trying to face the future together.
Reading Nick Hunt's book, I mentioned feeling a sense of "the End of Civilisation is imminent"; Judith Kerr reminds me that, as Hunt should jolly well have known, for the people in the countries he was walking through civilisation ended several times in the years between Patrick Leigh Fermor's walk and his, and actually, a lot of people made it through to the other side of the end of their world, in some cases only to be confronted by the end of the new world as well, and still kept on going. It's a short book, but it contains a lot of wisdom.
