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Elke Schmitter
Veras Tochter
(Vera’s Daughter)
Berlin Verlag, 192 pp. We’ve all empathised with particular characters in books, all sighed as we recognised a situation or an emotion close to one we have experienced. But what happens if you open a novel and there is precisely your story in all its painful and harrowing detail? This is the audacious – indeed cheeky – device with which, in her new novel, Elke Schmitter follows up the international success of her last novel, Mrs Sartoris. In a mere 192 pages the life of her young and vulnerable protagonist, Katharina, the Vera’s daughter of the title, is probed and laid out. The novel begins with the girl leafing through a magazine at the hairdresser’s and lighting on a short book review that hits her like a punch in the stomach. It is a review of Mrs Sartoris itself (yes, nothing less!), and it sends Vera to a bookshop where, with shaking fingers, she starts to read. Surely the Frau Sartoris of the novel, who never quite belonged, has an affair with a married man, and for a moment believes, like a modern Emma Bovary, the impossible dream that a new beginning could be hers, must be based on her mother? Alas, the handsome cultural attaché doesn’t turn up for the rendez-vous, the dream is in shreds, the marriage wrecked. But now comes the biggest shock. For the novel relates how Margaret, the mother in the novel, discovering that her rather colourless daughter, still at school, is stealing out at night to meet an unsuitable older man, takes her chance to run him over in her fast car on a dark, wet night.
Could this really be what happened in her own and
her mother’s life? And could it explain why Katharina’s
boyfriend Robert suddenly vanished? So many details
fit – the family set-up, the mother’s exotic best friend,
the inoffensive husband with the false leg. What’s the
explanation? In a final bold twist – the cheekiest of all
– Schmitter has her protagonist write to Berlin Verlag –
the publishers of Mrs Sartoris, of course – asking for
explanations, and then to Schmitter herself – who
replies with a letter on how novelists really work.
These are spectacular twists, but beneath them is a
true humanity. A thrilling and brilliant book.
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