Remote Sympathy: LONGLISTED FOR THE WOMEN'S PRIZE FOR FICTION 2022: Catherine Chidgey

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Another narrative strand is provided by Greta’s imaginary diary and, finally, by the intermittent accounts of Weimar citizens. I experience pukapuka about the Nazis as a judgement on me personally, and I think that’s because I hear them whisper to me: this could happen again. This could be you. I feel it as an implicit challenge to my civic-self – a reminder that these are the lengths to which a state founded on and fully committed to white supremacy can go. When Frau Hahn is forced into an unlikely and poignant alliance with one of Buchenwald’s prisoners, Dr Lenard Weber, her naïve obtuseness about what is going on so close at hand around her is challenged.

There is no shying away from the uncomfortable truths of history in this novel. Although we do not spend that much time in the camp, it hangs over every chapter of this novel as a dark reminder of what happened. The horrors and unthinkable crimes are brought up again and again with the stark contrast of Greta's world versus Weber's being a main theme throughout. Sometimes, according to Dietrich Hahn, prisoners are released — “it’s good for morale.” Everything is riddled with lies. Camp wives other than Greta, it is said, live in bizarre luxury – one bathes in Madeira wine and plays with a solid gold chess set. Greta’s new friend Emmi tells her it’s an “Aladdin’s Cave — anything you want, you can have, made by the finest craftsmen.” The depiction of camp life was suitably horrific, justifiably so, but I was really interested to find at the end of the book that much of it was based on real people and events, with post-war trial detail being taken directly from the American Military Tribunal in 1947. Il primo io-narrante che incontriamo - in una lettera alla figlia scritta nel 1946 ha fin qui condotto il racconto iniziando dal 1930 e a questo punto è giunto al 1936 - la sente pronunciare dal direttore dell’ospedale dove lavora, apprende che il suo problema, quello che gli impedisce di proseguire la sperimentazione medica, è avere sposato una donna ebrea.Do you know,’ says Greta’s new friend Emmi, ‘they released some of the Polish child prisoners because they found out they had Aryan blood?’

When Frau Hahn’s poor health leads her into an unlikely and poignant friendship with one of Buchenwald’s prisoners, Dr Lenard Weber, her naive ignorance about what is going on so nearby is challenged. A decade earlier, Dr Weber had invented a machine believed that its subtle resonances might cure cancer. But does it really work? One way or another, it might save a life. In his interviews, Dietrich insists that he was “merely in supplies”. He boasts that his careful budgeting allowed every prisoner to receive “precisely the amount of food required”. He could tell, he explains, from a chart in the camp kitchens showing “little red tabs that indicated every ten deaths”.

When Frau Hahn's poor health leads her into an unlikely and poignant friendship with one of Buchenwald's prisoners, Dr Lenard Weber, her naive ignorance about what is going on so nearby is challenged. A decade earlier, Dr Weber had invented a machine believed that its subtle resonances might cure cancer. But does it really work? One way or another, it might save a life. His life and that of his machine come to the attention of Dietrich Hahn, SS Sturmbanfuhrer, whose wife Greta has cancer. Sent to run Buchenwald from Munich, Hahn arranges for Weber to be sent to Buchenwald to treat his ailing wife with the machine, hoping to cure her so that they can be the perfect Aryan family. The villa is perfect, the scenery beautiful, the villagers complacent..... Inspired by David Copperfield, Kingsolver crafts a 21st-century coming-of-age story set in America’s hard-pressed rural South. Just as faith in Weber’s device pivots on an unstable platform of desperation, hope and straightforward pretence, so the innocence in Semprun’s quote is strained by increasing evidence of the realities of the camp. As the prison population begins to rise, the job becomes ever more consuming. Corruption is rife at every level, the supplies are inadequate, and the sewerage system is under increasing strain.

Catherine Chidgey’s novels have been published to international acclaim. Her first, In a Fishbone Church, won Best First Book at the New Zealand Book Awards and at the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize (South East Asia and South Pacific). In the UK it won the Betty Trask Award and was longlisted for the Orange Prize. Her second, Golden Deeds, was a Notable Book of the Year in the New York Times Book Review and a Best Book in the LA Times Book Review. Catherine has won the Prize in Modern Letters, the Katherine Mansfield Award, the Katherine Mansfield Fellowship, the Janet Frame Fiction Prize, and the Acorn Foundation Fiction Prize for The Wish Child. Catherine has a degree in German literature and lived in Berlin for three years during the 1990s. She now lives in Ngāruawāhia, and lectures in Creative Writing at the University of Waikato. Un’altra statistica invece trasforma Buchenwald in un luogo quasi virtuoso: di quel quinto di morti, “solo” un quinto era composto da ebrei. Dr Lenard Weber, inventor of the “Sympathetic Vitaliser”, is the most reliable among Chidgey’s grouping of different narrators. He is violently arrested one afternoon; Dietrich Hahn wants him to treat his wife, whose illness appears terminal. Weber reconstructs the machine and, under the watchful eye of her husband, begins to treat Greta, all the time knowing the machine is probably a failure. Bearing witness to what I believe is the most depraved act of humankind has always been difficult for me to do. All too many hobbyist writers use the Holocaust as a plot point to add suspense or adventure to a novel when in reality, the evil perpetuated there was so heinous and unimaginable that it is hard for the human mind to fathom how anyone could ever have been privy to it. For this reason, I typically gravitate to books that reimagine the Holocaust and show how art triumphs over evil: I’m thinking books like The White Hotel, Blessing on the Moon, and Mischling. I must admit I sometimes struggled with the subject matter of the book - as one that however terrible and pivotal to 20th Century history - is one that has been comprehensively covered in novels and on-fiction books and often by authors with a much closer (in many cases immediate) connection to the horrors of the Holocaust (I recall reading Corrie ten Boom’s amazing “Hiding Place” when I was quite young for example).In its deft melding of fact and fiction, . . . its skilful examination of human sympathy and faith, its dramatic tension and quiet lyricism, Remote Sympathytakes us bravely, compellingly, into the uncertain heart of human complicity.' —Sally Blundell, Academy of NZ Literature So a slightly uneven book for me which had some pacing issues and which didn't always hang together as organically as I'd have wished - but potent and serious, all the same: 3.5 stars. SHORTLISTED for the Dublin Literary Award 2022 A novel of devastating beauty that will leave readers shaken and exhilarated. When Greta is diagnosed with cancer, the three characters are brought into conjunction. Hearing of Weber’s “miracle machine”, Dietrich offers him inducements to treat Greta: news of his wife and child; lighter duties that might keep him alive. As their lives and fates intersect, so too do their lies and self-deceits. Dietrich must conceal their arrangement; Greta must feign ignorance of her new doctor’s circumstances; Weber must offer hope for her survival, now inextricable from his own. There are three key narrators here. One is Lenard Weber, a Munich physician who identifies as Lutheran who may be on the verge of inventing a technological advance in the fight against cancer. Because he has a tiny smidgen of Jewish blood, he eventually finds himself at the Buchenwald concentration camp. His sections are written as letters to the young daughter he had with his Jewish wife.

Notable, too, are the grotesque scenes of Nazi wives discussing their beautiful new houses at Buchenwald as if they were gushing in Homes & Gardens magazine. Some are more naive than others about exactly what is going on in the camp (a labour camp, not an extermination camp) or exactly who is responsible for the beautiful workmanship of jewellery that they proudly show off or the tailoring and textiles which they love to admire.Catherine Chidgey is a novelist and short story writer whose work has been published to international acclaim. In a Fishbone Church won Best First Book at the New Zealand Book Awards and at the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize in her region. In the UK it won the Betty Trask Award and was longlisted for the Orange Prize. Golden Deeds was Time Out’s book of the year, a Notable Book of the Year in The New York Times and a Best Book in the LA Times. She has won the Prize in Modern Letters, the Katherine Mansfield Award, the Katherine Mansfield Fellowship, the Janet Frame Fiction Prize, and the Acorn Foundation Fiction Prize for The Wish Child. Remote Sympathy was shortlisted for the DUBLIN Literary Award and the Jann Medlicott Acorn Prize for Fictio Catherine Chidgey is a novelist and short story writer whose work has been published to international acclaim. In a Fishbone Church won Best First Book at the New Zealand Book Awards and at the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize in her region. In the UK it won the Betty Trask Award and was longlisted for the Orange Prize. Golden Deeds was Time Out’s book of the year, a Notable Book of the Year in The New York Times and a Best Book in the LA Times. She has won the Prize in Modern Letters, the Katherine Mansfield Award, the Katherine Mansfield Fellowship, the Janet Frame Fiction Prize, and the Acorn Foundation Fiction Prize for The Wish Child. Remote Sympathy was shortlisted for the DUBLIN Literary Award and the Jann Medlicott Acorn Prize for Fiction, and was longlisted for the Women’s Prize for Fiction. The Axeman's Carnival won the Acorn at the New Zealand Book Awards - the country's biggest literary prize. Moving away from their lovely apartment in Munich isn’t nearly as wrenching an experience for Frau Greta Hahn as she had feared. Their new home is even lovelier than the one they left behind and life in Buchenwald would appear to be idyllic. Lying just beyond the forest that surrounds them is the looming presence of a work camp. Frau Hahn’s husband, SS Sturmbannfuhrer Dietrich Hahn, has been assigned as the camp’s administrator. Every time I read a pukapuka set in Nazi times I become obsessed with the question: what would I have done if I had been there? I remember studying Nazi Germany in high school and perseverating on the idea that the ordinary people of Germany could have stopped it all from happening if they had just banded together. At 16, I could not imagine turning my eyes away. I knew for certain: I would have seen through the Nazi propaganda and fought them tooth and nail (probably in a smart trenchcoat like Michelle in ‘Allo ‘Allo!). Now, at 40, I am uneasily not so sure. A tour de force about the evils of obliviousness, Remote Sympathy compels us to question our continuing and wilful ability to look the other way in a world that is in thrall to the idea that everything-even facts and morals-is relative.