Hester Among the Ruins: A Novel - Softcover

Kirshenbaum, Binnie

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0393339343 ISBN 13: 9780393339345

Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company, 2002

Synopsis

A darkly comic novel with the moral power of Bernhard Schlink's The Reader about love in the shadows of history.

Born in New York in 1963, historian Hester Rosenfeld―very American and marginally Jewish―goes to Munich to research the life of Heinrich Falk and becomes his mistress. Born in Berlin in 1943, raised in the ruins of defeat by a generation of "murderers and cowards," Professor Falk is neither infamous nor famous―he is simply the German Everyman. Hester believes his life story could make for an important contemporary historical document―kitchen table history. Heinrich is married (four times, twice to his current wife) and has four daughters. But madly in love with Hester, adultery is nothing new to him. As he assists her in her note-taking―about him and his family, about German history―she often suspects Heinrich is covering up something. Was his brother really a Werewolf, a Nazi militiaman who vowed to continue fighting after the war's end? What kind of gas company did his mother work for? And what exactly did his father do during those years?

Yet Hester has her secrets, too, and the longer she remains in Germany the harder it is to keep them concealed. As she uncovers more of the Falk family's possible connection to Nazism, she finds herself reexamining her feelings about her own parents and her complicated attraction to Heinrich. As the lovers' intimacy deepens beyond the erotic, each suspects the other of hiding something about the past.

Called a "rare and remarkable writer" by Pulitzer Prize-winning author Michael Cunningham, Kirshenbaum has written a searing novel about history's unforgettable legacy and its continuing impact.

About this title

Review

As if love affairs were not already delicate enough, in Hester Among the Ruins, New Yorker Hester Rosenfeld decides to write the biography of her older German lover, Professor Heinrich Falk. Born in 1943, and married for the fourth time when he and Hester meet, Falk seems a German Everyman, embodying the troubled postwar identity of his nation. To be near her beloved, Hester moves to Munich. Their affair is secret. She spends her spare time in her hotel room, writing up notes and congratulating herself on how happy she is in the role of Other Woman. But being in Germany and researching the wartime years makes her think for the first time about her own Jewishness, and about her elderly immigrant parents who were so eager to assimilate into American culture that dishes like Rice-a-Roni appeared nightly on the dinner table. Hester comes to terms with her own shame and guilt while building a store of belated anger that finds expression in the direction of her research: the Nazi connections of her lover's family. "With vision skewed," she admits, "I am on the lookout for bad behavior. I expect these people to be hateful; I want them to be hateful, because if they are hateful then the world makes sense." A closely observed novel with an atmosphere of constriction and suspense, Hester Among the Ruins is a riveting, unsentimental exploration of the limits of love and understanding. --Regina Marler

About the Author

Binnie Kirshenbaum is the author of three novels, On Mermaid Avenue, A Disturbance in One Place, and Pure Poetry, and a story collection, History on a Personal Note. She teaches at Columbia University's Graduate School of the Arts, and she lives in New York City.

About this edition

• Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
• Publication date: 2002
• ISBN 10: 0393339343
• ISBN 13: 9780393339345
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 288