Summertime sadness with Ukrainian tomato plants
3 stars
A sad story about growing up in Soviet Ukraine and post-socialist East Germany.
The early chapters describe the childhood and teenage years of Lena in pre-1989 Ukraine - we get to know her gentle father and her tough mother, and see how much tenderness she has for her mother, despite/because of her strictness. This part of the novel is beautiful, as is the description of her intense encounter with an eccentric girl she meets at summer camp. (Probably the most vividly described character, and definitely my favourite. It's also where the tomato plants come in. For me this was the queerest part of the book. There are also other queer strands, though I still wanted more!)
I wish the novel had continued with that single strand, rather than opting for "four women -- multiple generations -- how will they communicate with each other?" which has become a bit of a …
A sad story about growing up in Soviet Ukraine and post-socialist East Germany.
The early chapters describe the childhood and teenage years of Lena in pre-1989 Ukraine - we get to know her gentle father and her tough mother, and see how much tenderness she has for her mother, despite/because of her strictness. This part of the novel is beautiful, as is the description of her intense encounter with an eccentric girl she meets at summer camp. (Probably the most vividly described character, and definitely my favourite. It's also where the tomato plants come in. For me this was the queerest part of the book. There are also other queer strands, though I still wanted more!)
I wish the novel had continued with that single strand, rather than opting for "four women -- multiple generations -- how will they communicate with each other?" which has become a bit of a formula, particularly in novels in German about recent history.
I found this book relentlessly sad. The whole novel is about loss; all the characters lose each other and/or lose their sense of home. I'm not anti-sadness, but I wished for some tonal shifts, because I gradually became a bit numb and some of the book's painful moments would be more effective if there were more lightness in between. Sometimes I also struggled with Lena's emotional detachment as an adult - e.g. there is a long period in which she never travels to visit her parents, but we don't really learn why that is; her detachment is treated as obvious, but I wanted to know how it came about.
I think this is likely to be translated into English (Salzmann's debut was translated) and I do recommend it to anyone who is on a quest for "queer Eastern Europe".