The translator of Helfer's book points to the universalization of the question – the condition of women during the war. And cites a quote from Tamara Duda's “Kalishvili”: “War is a closed men's club, but somehow it backfires on women.”
Lucia Berlin, Welcome back home, translated. Dobromila Jankovska, Tsarne 2024
I've lived in so many places it's almost absurd… and because I've lived so often, place is very, very important to me. I'm constantly looking… I'm looking for a home.
This first sentence of the book comes from the introduction by Lucia's son, Jeff, but his point is taken from an interview. And indeed there were many such places. It seems that she originally had the idea that in this book she would not write about people, but only about places, but a house is more than rooms and grounds, it is the life in them that cannot be missed, and that was the life of Lucia Berlin. Intense and mostly not easy. Unfortunately, he didn't finish this book, he died and stopped mid-sentence, bringing his story back to 1965, when he was only twenty-nine years old.
He died in 2004 – obviously not where he was born. He was born in Alaska, and then the family changed their place of residence several times, his father was a mining engineer, he worked in different mining settlements, to be honest, they were kind of in the middle of nowhere. In 1941, he joined the army and went to war, while his mother Lucia and his sister moved to Texas to live with their grandparents.
Then more places – years in Chile and more, and then for a long time he did not live anywhere for more than a few months. In the late 1980s, he compiled a list of them and there were eighteen, and noted the problems associated with them. It is barely visible, but also impressive – there are many earthquakes and floods, but also no stove, thin walls, bats or the drunkenness of the people she lived with, her mother constantly cries…
Of course, there is more to the book than that. And all three of his marriages and four children. Her first husband was a sculptor who tried to sculpt her, that is, to portray and act as she wanted at every moment. And if he slept on his face, so that his nose would rise less. When she told him that she was pregnant with her second child, he didn't like it and just left. The other was a pretty good and basically poor jazz musician, but he left her for a rich friend – that was his name. He looked pretty good, but there was one hitch – he turned out to be addicted to heroin. During this time, she had periods of real poverty and luxury, not only with her last husband, but also in Chile, where servants lived quite lavishly and among the elite. Prince Ali Khan lit his first cigarette.
This part of the book is very readable, short and sparse on words and emotions. But there is also the other half – a selection of letters he wrote to a number of friends during the same period. (and many photos). And from a literary point of view, it's not so good, it's often chaotic, we don't always understand the context. It's interesting, though, because we can compare these personal documents to what they describe, transformed into literature – autobiographical, but formally refined. In fact, we know many such stories.
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And at the end Welcome back home is a book that will be read mainly – I'm not saying it's only for – fans of his short stories, especially the collection Instructions for cleaning ladies. When we read a story about a girl living with her grandparents – her grandfather is a dentist and a nasty alcoholic and her mother is a drinker – we know that this is a biographical fact and we find that story too Let's go back home. But in the story, at the end, at his request, the girl removes all her grandfather's teeth. It is known that Berlin wrote about his life, but he added exaggerated and fictional elements. Where does truth end and fiction begin? Autofiction. The combination of letters, stories and autobiographical prose is a very interesting literary game. And if someone starts with autobiographies and wants short stories, he will also read them a little differently. But why does it matter to us what is truth and what is fiction?
Monica Helfer, Rabli, translated. Arkadiusz Żychliński, Filters 2023
Here, take those pencils, draw a little house with a stream and a well below, but don't draw the sun because the house is in the shadow! Behind him is a mountain – a straight rock. In front of the house, a woman is standing upright, hanging laundry on a line, the thread is not properly stretched, holding two cherry trees, one rises on the right side of the porch, the other on the left.
Pencils were very expensive for this family at the time, but the picture is still being made. Who is going to create it? The narrator is the same as the author, in his head. So we are in autofiction. Monica Hefler was already seventy years old when this book was published. And this is the first of three books on the fate of his family. Hopefully we'll have a chance to read the next one too! Although the author has been known in Austria for years, only these years have brought him spectacular success among readers and critics. He deserved it. Because the important thing is not only what you have to say or not have at all, but the form you find for it.
In short, this story seems quite simple. A small alpine village, the beginning of the First World War. A very poor family, Maria and Josef Musbrugge, with four children, live in primitive conditions at the farthest edge of the village. He has to go to the army, she, still a woman in her thirties, is left alone with the children, dependent on the help of her husband's friend, Mary. She's very pretty, so Mary… you know. A stranger from the city also appears in his life for a moment, who reminds him what love can be, but nothing happens. My husband comes twice on vacation. A child is born. The village admits that this is the result of betrayal.
The picture, which is created before our eyes, turns from an idyllic sketch into a realistic picture: after the war, we see the whole family and the fifth child, a girl. The father acts as if he does not exist. He never looks at her, never talks to her. And this rejected girl is the mother of the author/narrator.
Different planes of time are mixed in the novel – the narrator is present, talking to his aunt or maybe other relatives, collecting family news. He looks at the past with gentle distance, but without sentimentality. And the sound of the title, which is chosen by the translator as a title, is slightly different from the original Die Baggage, which has lost its meaning and is a pejorative term for people we hold in low esteem – Rabla? However, as the translator claims, the author neutralizes the superior nature of this term. He constructs his characters not just as marginalized people, but as powerful heroes, people who enjoy grudging respect and stand out.
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So this is neither a sentimentalization of its roots nor a story with an “important class message”. The translator points to the universalization of the question – the situation of women during the war. And I remember the quote daughters Tamara Duda: “War is a closed men's club, but for some reason it backfires on women.” In fact, it might even apply to Lucia Berlin, when we remember what she writes about being at her grandparents' house while her father was away at war.
(translate tags) biographies