‘The Paardenstraat is a narrow, crooked street, in which no horse can turn around,’ wrote the legendary publisher Geert van Oorschot (1909-1986) about the Vlissingen street where he was born. There are no horses anymore, but there is a bookcase on one of the facades: beautiful gray, slightly weathered by the sea wind. There lies on a solid foundation of three John Grishams, among others When she starts to tell (2005) by Irene Dische.
And it is told. In the first sentence we read ‘the fact that my granddaughter is so difficult is due to the small number of cells in Carl’s sperm’, a little further we are told about this Carl: ‘He reproduced himself in me and then he plowed on. ” Even before the first of the 329 pages has ended, Carl has tried to settle a discussion with the statement: “Not everything about the Jews is bad.” Which is remarkable, because Carl is a convinced anti-Semite who believes that the Jews in Nazi Germany get what they deserve. Complication: Carl is a Jew himself, although he converted to Catholicism upon his marriage, something that did not impress the German authorities in the 1930s. Almost all his relatives are murdered.
But it’s not about Carl: the dazzling narrative voice (greatly translated by Tinke Davids). When she starts to tell is that of the impatient, quick-tempered and very outspoken Elisabeth Rother, a German woman from a respectable Catholic background: the well-to-do circles where at the time everyone had a NSDAP membership card in the dresser drawer. She is more a woman of status than of revolt, but when the Nazis make things increasingly difficult for her husband, she shows heroism. And when he flees to America, she resists pressure from the Gestapo to divorce him; That is not allowed by God. Ultimately, she too dares to cross, although she later has to come to terms with the knowledge that her daughter is making exactly the same mistake as she did: marrying a Jew. In the meantime, she throws out life lessons (all men are weaklings) and theatrically predicts that this year will really be her last on earth.
That marriage produces that granddaughter about whom Elisabeth is unkind in the first sentence of her account. Time and again this is put into place with short intermediate sentences, while the reader soon understands that this no-good granddaughter is Irene Dische herself. That’s it When she starts to tell a refreshing variation on the genre in which a good author conducts sensitive research into his own family history. Dische shows through Elisabeth that you can also tell such a story with all the rough edges. Wonderful book.
Would you like to have the discussed copy When she starts to talk? Send an email to boekuitdekast@ nrc.nl; it will be raffled among entrants and the winner will be notified.