MOTHERLAND
Book ID/图书代码： 02330013B62454
English Summary/英文概要： Lifted from the stories of the author’s father and his German childhood and letters between her grandparents that were hidden in an attic wall for fifty years, Motherland focuses
on a German family during WWII: a reconstructive surgeon loses his wife in childbirth and two months later marries a young woman who must look after the baby and his two grieving sons when he is drafted into medical military service. We follow her attempts to keep them safe as their German city is bombed by the Allies, their town is faced with the swelling population of desperate refugees, and one son begins to mentally unravel. Each family member’s fateful choices lead them deeper into questions of complicity and innocence, to the novel’s unforgettable conclusion.
Chinese Summary/中文概要： 本书的故事灵感来自作者的父亲和他在德国的童年，以及藏在阁楼墙壁五十年之久的她的祖父母之间的信，《故土》主要讲述第二次世界大战期间一个德国家庭的故事：一个整形外科医生的妻子在分娩时去世了，两个月后他娶了一位年轻女子，她要在他被征召入伍为军医时，照顾他刚出生的宝宝和两个儿子。当他们的德国城市被盟军轰炸，他们的城市正面临着绝望的难民人口膨胀，以及其中一个儿子已经面临精神崩溃了，她要想方设法保护他们的安全。每个家庭成员至关重要的选择会带领他们进入共犯和清白问题的更深层次，小说的启示令人难忘。(LNL)
Awards/获奖情况：“In stunning, pitch-perfect prose, Maria Hummel gives us a deeply moving portrait of lives on the wrong side of history. This isn’t just another World War II novel; it’s a spectacular story about what it means to love and hope in the most difficult times.” —Jesmyn Ward, Salvage the Bones, Winner of the National Book Award
“These characters appear to have, at best, blinders on and, at worse, to be in denial about the fate of their missing Jewish neighbors and what is actually going on at camps like Buchenwald. However, these all-too-human failings are so honestly rendered that a stark question emerges: Who among us, faced with similar circumstances, would have acted differently? Heart-rending and chilling.” —Kirkus, Starred Review
“In prose that is both spare and heavily laden with the exhausted emotion of hard living, Hummel maintains a claustrophobic undercurrent of fear even when describing mundane daily tasks. Dark and uncompromising, Motherland illuminates a little-examined aspect of the war.” —Booklist
REVIEW by MAUDE MCDANIEL
Sometimes life presents you with a slate of bad choices—though some are braver than others. In Motherland, Maria Hummel, author of several novels and a former Stegner Fellow in poetry, enters relatively unfamiliar literary territory to tell the story of one so-called Mitläufer family: German citizens who would never have personally countenanced the terrible abuses that Jews suffered, but nonetheless went along with the Nazi regime. They paid for it in the end—if not as heavily as their Jewish counterparts.
The Kappus family has already gone through heartbreak: Liesl and Frank are recently married after the death of Frank’s first wife (in childbirth with their third son). When Frank is drafted into medical military service, Liesl is left alone to care for his three sons during the last months of WWII, with the front growing ever closer and food and resources becoming more scarce.
Hummel gathered her raw material from the life of her grandfather, reflected in letters written during the war and discovered in an attic wall. Just as Londoners suffered under the Blitz, German citizens spent the last year of the war living as no human being should, amid the horrors of daily air raids and the loss of those they loved. Hummel somehow manages, without sensationalism, to drive home the humanity and suffering of the people who are frequently considered only as the enemy.
Like its characters, Motherland displays little awareness of the Jewish experience, a fact that may trouble some readers. In her afterword, Hummel argues that omission was necessary in order to present her characters’ lives authentically, asking "What did [German citizens] know and when did they know it?" Perhaps only now is the world ready to offer understanding. Without canceling out our sympathy for those targeted by the Nazis, this humane and compelling story may extend it to those who (often unwittingly) assisted in some of humanity’s worst crimes—and who themselves got flicked by the tail of the beast
About the Author/作者介绍： 玛丽亚•胡默尔是斯坦福大学的斯特格纳研究员，她的作品被刊登在《犁头》、《太阳报》和《信徒》上，并获得了“手推车奖”。她的第一部小说《荒野奔跑》（2002年）是布尔迪点亮协会的替代选择。Maria Hummel is a Stegner Fellow at Stanford University and her work has appeared in Ploughshares, The Sun, The Believer and has won a Pushcart Prize. Her first novel, Wilderness
Run (SMP, 2002) was an alternate selection of Doubleday Lit Guild.
Format:电子手稿
Rights Status/版权销售情况：Simplified Chinese/简体中文：AVAILABLE
Complex/Traditional Chinese/繁体中文：AVAILABLE
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