The Oblique Place by Caterina Pascual Söderbaum
The Oblique Place by Caterina Pascual Söderbaum
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
A woman who is part Spaniard and part Swede grew up in a household in which a portrait of Hitler was a prominent and honored feature of the house; her father was a Spanish admirer of Hitler and supporter of fascists. This memory haunts the pages of this complex book. Söderbaum died after preparing this book for publication; it is a shame that there can be no more of her writing. But this book is one-0f-a-kind from the outset, and the consolation of that reminds me that she likely poured everything into the creation of this fiction. It certainly reads that way. This stream of consciousness in which she creates her novel is readable in spite of the length of the sentences and paragraphs, and the work one puts into the unpacking of the language makes the experience unforgettable, or at least did so for me. I did not expect to like the book when I began it but found myself drawn into it more and more. She is writing about familiar material, the trauma of Nazism, using as her touchstone an album of photographs from her childhood that, like the Hitler portrait, has grown more ominous with time. She slowly uncovers her own connection to atrocities, journeying into the past through her study of the photographs and travels with her family to some of the places where these atrocities occur. The book is filled with beautiful images of light and landscape, a dreamy and sensual revisiting of a past that remains horrific even when viewed from beautiful vistas and peaceful modern shores. A big, ambitious book that succeeds on its own terms.