Paula – Sandra Hoffman (2017)

Translated from German by Katy Derbyshire

With thanks to the publisher for the review ebook and inviting me to be part of this blog tour.

Paula is one of three titles that have been chosen to launch V&Q books – an English language imprint of the German publisher Voland & Quist Verlag. This new imprint was launched earlier this week, so a big congratulations to all those involved. Translator Katy Derbyshire is heading up the imprint, which intends to publish up to five or six books a year, those books being, literary fiction and narrative nonfiction.  From the publisher’s website I can see that the intention of this imprint is to publish books telling the stories of complex relationships, migration, and its impact on people’s lives. These are definitely the kinds of books I find fascinating – and I suspect those readers already interested in the publishers like Fitzcarraldo will find plenty to like here.

I think it’s important for us all to know where we come from. Most families have those little stories often repeated of people long dead, things that happened many decades earlier – these stories are part of our make up, we love to tell them because they are a part of us.

Paula is a piece of autofiction in which the author seeks to explore and understand her relationship with her grandmother Paula. It is a delicate, intelligent piece of writing in which the author uses fiction to fill in the gaps in her knowledge about her family. Paula, the author’s grandmother was a devout Swabian Catholic born in 1915. She was a woman who the author was to go on to have a complex relationship with throughout her life. Paula refused to reveal who fathered her daughter (the author’s mother) in the 1940s – her silence on this, and the life she led during this period was absolute and was to have a profound effect on the following two generations.

“My grandmother Paula died on 10 November 1997 at the age of 82. She never talked about herself, not to the very end. She took her whole life to the grave, all her secrets and all her troubles.”

The child Sandra spent a lot of time with Paula, she recalls them regularly sitting together on the sofa watching Bonanza. She became concerned as a child that her mother didn’t have a father – and would ask why that was. Nothing was explained – she would listen carefully to what was said by her great aunt Marie and by her mother – but the truth of her grandmother’s past was always something out of reach. Sandra became determined to get to the bottom of it – to unravel the little mystery at the heart of her own family. Sandra is darker skinned than the other people in the village where the family live, and she wonders if in that there is a clue to who her grandfather was.

She discovers her grandmother’s photographs hundreds of them in homemade boxes and albums, – and starts to study them for clues. The photographs are full of people Sandra doesn’t know, pictures of men standing next to ships or motorbikes, posing in forests or fields. Many of the men are in uniform, some are dark skinned. Then there were the pictures of Paula and her sisters Marie and Theresia, photos of weddings and so on. These photographs are tantalising little glimpses into the past, and Sandra becomes sure that one of the unknown men in the photographs must be her mother’s father.

“I am an unreliable narrator. I’ve done talking therapy. I’ve reflected on my life. I’ve tried to trace the paths I’ve taken, to understand the past storms inside of me so that I can weather the storms to come.”

There is a deep affection for the woman Paula was when Sandra was a child, she remembers her scent – the feel of her skin, of her grandmotherly body lying next to her at night when she had had a bad dream. There is a deep poignancy to these tender recollections – especially when we consider the difficulties that were to come as Sandra got older.

As Sandra grows older her grandmother begins to annoy her more and more – Sandra is infuriated by her constant presence as if she is following her round the house – appearing in her room, not respecting her privacy. Sandra’s brother though doesn’t seem to have the same issues – isn’t watched in quite the same way – it makes the reader wonder – did something happen to Paula that made her so hyper-vigilant of her young granddaughter, or did she witness things in the war? – was that part of her silent past.  

“What makes a person? And how can a woman add up, build up to a real live individual if she’s done her utmost to reveal nothing of herself? Her voice, to find out what her voice adds up to, you have to imagine yourself so close you can feel her, hear it her inner murmur, her silent conversation, her thinking through prayer. Groping for understanding, it is impossible to get close enough if you don’t start with your own memories.”

We see how over time both Sandra’s and her mother’s mental health are affected by this strange, strained silence about the past and their relationship with Paula. Sandra does her best to piece together what she can from things she hears or are told to her by others like her father – but ultimately the silence her grandmother brought to their family is total, and far reaching.

Paula is a tenderly written book – whether you could call it fiction or memoir is debatable – it certainly has elements of both. The whole works beautifully – a blend of fiction and memoir, which tells the story of a family, and the writer it produced.