Counterintuitively perhaps, or then again, not really so, Schlinck’s cities are centripetal, the countryside centrifugal.īelonging, the tensions of movement and stasis, the agency and power (or the utter powerlessness) of the eye of the beholder, are the warp and weft of this ultimately perplexing narrative, which interweaves a strong sense of interiority with discourses of witnessing, of an externalised (yet inalienably implicated) critical observer.

At the heart of Schlinck’s story is the question of centrality and margins: of cities or urban spaces as the places of movement, community, even self-asserting anonymity, and of rural settings as the realms of hardness and hardship, of almost alienating traditionalism and nativism. It reintroduces several of Schlinck’s past key elements, such as the conceit of a working class/upper class divide, of the lives and spirits inhabiting worlds of in-betweenness, ambiguity, or historical anachronicity, of a German/non-German rift, of the different ontological experiences of men and women. Olga is both a mystery and somewhat of a problem. Populate that landscape with a few type-worthy characters, give them a twist or two of drama and personality, and you have the setting and dramatis personae of Bernhard Schlink’s much anticipated, long-gestated new novel, Olga.

It is a landscape of hazy horizons, vast, yet with a looming, forbidding presence a frontier-land of ghosts with a centrality of its very own a world where myth and legend, history and stories become enshrined in the reliquary of a new, bold, intrepid and radical modernity. A country of those who remember an empire of Prussian states before its growth into a German Reich and nation, and of those who choose to forget foreign tongues, blood, or familiar horizons in order to become embedded, received, integrated, in a peculiar blend of other sameness. Imagine a perfect (imperfect), remote and rural, Volkisch German landscape: replete with lush meadows and muddy, green pastures, well-ordered small villages abuzz with their perennial hierarchies of landed gentry, newly rich bourgeois grandees, the teachers and clergy, the pure and echt common Volk of farmers and housewives, the idle, reminiscing elderly, the burgeoning young. “ A poignant portrait of a woman out of step with her time.” Observer

Bernhard schlink olga