Where we came from and where we are now: Homeland & Farewell, My Orange

As if my head weren’t buzzing enough with the enigma of identity, I’ve recently read two translated novels exploring the gap between where the characters come from and where they ended up. In the first, a forty-something German man has given little thought to his origins across the border; in the second, two women, juggle loneliness and language difficulties as they gradually acclimatise to new lives in Australia, far from home.

Homeland by Walter Kempowski translated
by Charlotte Collins

In the year before the fall of the Berlin wall, Hamburg-based journalist, Jonathan Fabrizius, is invited to travel to Poland to research a story for a luxury car company. In his mid-40s, but not yet middle-aged in his ambitions, or in his relationship with his girlfriend who lives the other side of a(nother) makeshift wall, Jonathan is unsure whether to accept. But it would be an opportunity to see his birthplace: Jonathan was born on the Eastern Front as his mother fled west at the end of the war. Orphaned by the time he crossed the border, he was brought up by his uncle and never had any particular desire to go back.
 
Of course he goes on the trip, and comes face-to-face with the beauty, poverty and painful history of that long-contested land. While there isn’t a great deal of tension in the plot, there’s a wonderful dry humour in his observations, and those of his two travel companions, and of the larger group of elderly Germans whose tour Jonathan and his colleagues inadvertently tail. Anguish and guilt fester beneath the surface, both on account of historical wounds and the current discrepancy in wealth. Although Jonathan tries, particularly when he agrees to a woman’s request he send medicine for her daughter with serious mental health problems, even without the language difficulties, the differences between the two cultures and countries are too wide to bridge.
 
Unable to relate on an equal footing, the travellers alternate between gushing delight in the simplicity and fierce criticism of whatever interferes with the smoothness of their path, familiar to anyone who’s journeyed from a First World country to the Third. But even before Jonathan leaves Germany, there’s an undercurrent of collusion with violence, especially in girlfriend Ulla’s professional obsession with depictions of cruelty and torture, and in the imagery, such as on a visit to a Turkish restaurant (p31):

The blurb asks:
 
Do we need to know where we’ve come from in order to know who we are?
 
a current preoccupation of mine with the publication my forthcoming short story collection, Becoming Someone. I’m not sure if I was supposed to be more moved by Jonathan’s new connection to his origins but I’d rephrase the novel’s theme as
 
Do we need to know about our dark side in order to know who we are?
 
explored, as referenced in my recent post on concepts of identity in classic novels, in The Picture of Dorian Gray.
 
Homeland was first published in German in 1992; Charlotte Collins’ translation is fresh this month from Granta books who provided my review copy. They also published All for Nothing, perhaps a greater work, but, much as I appreciated that novel, I enjoyed the clash of light and dark in Homeland more.

Farewell, My Orange by Iwaki Kei translated
by Meredith McKinney

When two women join an English-language class in a small town in Australia, they seem to have little in common. Salimah, a refugee from an unnamed African country, and illiterate in her native tongue, is assigned to reading weather reports from the local newspaper but, while she stumbles over the words, her voice is strong. Sayuri, having come from Japan for the sake of her husband’s work, is more articulate in English but less confident in herself having interrupted her university education to care for the baby daughter who accompanies her to the class.
 
Both women are lonely, with language differences and racism setting them apart from the communities in which they live. Both are abandoned by their husbands: Salimah literally through desertion; Sayuri psychologically through the demands of his job. Both will experience further loss. But when the women find themselves working side-by-side on the predawn shift packing meat in the back room of a supermarket, their support for each other enables them to forge stronger self-identities in an alien culture.
 
Making new friends can be difficult; how much harder that must be when the only way to connect is through a language alien to both. I found this aspect of Iwaki Kei’s debut novel intellectually moving but emotionally I struggled to connect and found the overall tone too flat. But you might enjoy it: the original Japanese version, published in 2013, was awarded a prestigious prize. I received a copy of the English translation from the publishers, Europa editions. See my post Concepts of identity in 9 classic novels for more on how looking or sounding different can impact on identity.

Thanks for your support for my blog tour and launch, I’m still catching up with all the lovely comments. The following day, I read On Writers and Writing by Margaret Atwood, which had been gathering dust on my desk for some time, and came across this fabulous quote (p97):

Publishing a book is often very much like being put on trial, for some offence which is quite other than the one you know in your heart you’ve committed.

Pity I didn’t read this BEFORE writing all those guest posts on the writer’s identity.