The Scrapbook

Biographer Clark (Red Comet: The Short Life and Blazing Art of Sylvia Plath) makes her fiction debut with a potent story of two lovers, one American and one German, reckoning with the legacy of WWII. It’s 1996 and Anna is in finals week at Harvard when she meets Christoph, a handsome and intelligent architecture student visiting from Germany. They end up spending the week together before he returns home. Set on seeing him again, Anna obtains a summer job teaching in Switzerland. She’s also been intrigued by German history since finding her late grandfather’s WWII mementos: a scrapbook of disturbing photos he snapped as a GI helping to liberate Dachau and the Nazi flag he took from Hitler’s summer house. In Germany, Christoph and Anna tour the courthouse where the Nuremberg trials were held, and he considers the nature of evil and grapples with his guilt as a German over the Holocaust. He admits his grandfather served in the Wehrmacht, but claims that he later joined the resistance after he was left for dead on the battlefield. Anna and Christoph’s discussions about all things German continue after they have sex against a tree in the Black Forest. He celebrates their encounter as something out of Goethe, while Anna feels like a character in a Brothers Grimm fairy tale. After returning to the U.S., she realizes she’s fallen in love with Christoph and is painfully unsure where she stands with him. Wartime vignettes featuring both of their grandfathers inject ironic and complicating truths into the nascent couple’s narrative, and into the stories they tell about the past. It’s a revelation. (June)