The Scrapbook: A Novel - Hardcover

Clark, Heather

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0593701909 ISBN 13: 9780593701904

Publisher: Pantheon, 2025

Synopsis

From the award-winning author of Red Comet: The Short Life and Blazing Art of Sylvia Plath, a stunning debut novel: the story of an intense first love haunted by history and family memory, inspired by the startling WWII scrapbook of Clark’s own grandfather, hidden in an attic until after his death

“An ambitious, stirring debut.” —People

“An elegant, unsettling novel about the burden of history and the illusions of love.” —Sana Krasikov, author of The Patriots

The traumas of the past and the aftershocks of fascism echo and reverberate through the present in this story of a lifechanging seduction.

Harvard, 1996. Anna is about to graduate when she falls hard for Christoph, a visiting German student. Captivated by his beauty and intelligence, she follows him to Germany, where charming squares and grand facades belie the nation’s recent history and the war’s destruction. Christoph condemns his country’s actions but remains cryptic about the part his own grandfather played. Anna, meanwhile, cannot forget the photos taken by her American GI grandfather at the end of the war, preserved in a scrapbook only she has seen.

As Anna travels back and forth to Germany to deepen her relationship with the elusive Christoph, her perspective is powerfully interrupted by chapters that follow both of their grandfathers during the war. One witnesses the plight of Holocaust victims in the days after liberation and helps capture Hitler’s Eagle’s Nest, while the other fights for Nazi Germany. Their fragmented stories haunt Anna and her lover two generations later—and may still tear them apart.

Not a “World War Two novel” in the traditional sense, The Scrapbook delivers a consuming tale of first love, laced with a backstory of dark family legacies and historical conscience.

About this title

About the Author

HEATHER CLARK is the author of Red Comet: The Short Life and Blazing Art of Sylvia Plath, one of the New York Times’s Ten Best Books of 2021, as well as a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Critics Circle Award, and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, and a “Book of the Year” in The Guardian, The Times, The Boston Globe, Literary Hub, and elsewhere. Her recent awards include a Guggenheim Fellowship, an NYPL Cullman Center Fellowship, the Truman Capote Award for Literary Criticism, the Slightly Foxed Best First Biography Prize, an NEH Public Scholars Fellowship, and a Leon Levy Biography Fellowship. Clark’s work has appeared in The New York Times, Harvard Review, Poetry, Time, Air Mail, Literary Hub, PN Review, Times Literary Supplement, and elsewhere. She holds a doctorate in English literature from Oxford University and lives outside New York City.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

I crossed borders for him. To Germany. I knew nothing of the country then. We met in Cambridge, a Harvard party. The details are not important. What matters is that he was not like the others and I knew this from the beginning. For years after I tried to tell myself that what happened between us was hardly worth remembering. Others told me the same. But now I write the truth. He was everything to me then. Everything.

My roommates did not like him. They ignored him the week he stayed. You barely know him, they said, and already you’re in love.

But they were wrong. I fell in love later. During that week, Christoph and I sat together by the window. We listened to music. My roommates came in and out of our suite, said quick hellos and were gone.

They don’t like me, he said. It’s because I’m German.

We were in bed, in my small corner room. There was a large window that looked out onto the courtyard. It was the end of spring term, the end of my senior year. Moonlight cut across my bed and illuminated our bodies like ghosts.

Probably, I said.

I don’t care, he said. And then, after a silence, But they should not judge.

He stayed with me the week before my final exams, the week I was supposed to be studying. I gave him novels to read; together we listened to Rachmaninoff, Stravinsky. When we talked, we talked mostly about music. How Bernstein played Beethoven’s 9th Symphony before the dismantled Berlin Wall to celebrate Germany’s reunification. How Shostakovich subverted Stalin’s demands, how Stalin could not tell the difference between patriotic music and music that mocked patriotism.

Maybe young men like Christoph existed somewhere at Harvard, probably they did, but I never found them. I was a rower and lived half my college life at the boathouse. The other half I lived at the library. I was shy and rarely spoke up in class. At night I played in a band. My experience of love was mostly drunk nights on beaches, or some rower’s dorm room.

He came to me the week I was supposed to be studying. I had to pass the En­glish exam to graduate with honors, I had to know everything about all of En­glish literature. We talked about Schopenhauer, Goethe, Joyce, as my roommates wandered in and out of the suite, said quick hellos and were gone. I knew he was leaving at the end of the week—­he would board a plane for Germany on the day of my first exam—­and so I could not concentrate. I began to care only about the sound of his voice, the movement of his hands. I forced myself to go to the library, I could hardly bear to be away from him. My world contracted: only he was real. I lay awake through our last night, committing the contours of his body to memory. Studying him.

I passed my exams. I graduated. I won an award for my thesis on Yeats and decided I would use the prize money to visit Christoph in Germany. I bought the ticket without asking him. I didn’t want his permission.

After he left, I read novels by Günter Grass and W. G. Sebald. I only wanted to talk about Germany, history, him. My roommates said I was becoming obsessed. One had lost her extended family at Treblinka. The other’s grandfather had survived Buchenwald. I knew little about the Second World War beyond what I had learned in classrooms, movies, a few books. My own grandfather had helped liberate Dachau as a young GI, but he rarely spoke of it. I had nothing to ground my relationship to the war beyond a Nazi flag he had brought back from Hitler’s summer-house in the Alps. And his scrapbook, the one with the photos.

In the days before I left for Germany, I could not sleep. I stayed awake and thought of Christoph, what it would be like to see him again. Now he knew I was coming. I had called him after my exams and told him, casually, about my plan. I had secured a job teaching En­glish at a summer camp in Switzerland that July. I asked if I could visit him for a few days before I started work there. After all, I said, he was not so far away. I could take the train from his place to Lausanne. Would that be all right? Yes, he said, great! He wanted to see me. He would show me his university town where he lived and studied, he would take me to Heidelberg and Munich. He wanted me to meet his roommate, Matthias. He had told him about me, his American girl.

My hand, holding the phone, began to tremble.

It was strange to think that he, too, had a roommate, that he was also a student, my age, that his life had any parallels to my own. I suppose I had imagined him living a very sure and serious life in Germany, reading Wittgenstein and Goethe. But no, he told me about all-­day hangovers and nights spent in muddy fields with the music pulsing through his body to the bodies dancing around him, wind and music moving through the trees. It was difficult to imagine him like this, dancing, drinking, standing close to other girls. He had been so sure and serious while he was with me, the week before my exams, the week I was supposed to be studying. We had listened to music, we had talked about the fall of Berlin, the siege of Leningrad. How Shostakovich premiered his 7th Symphony in the besieged city, how the German soldiers knew the war was lost when they heard it. And now this voice on the other end of the telephone, a casual, pleasant voice telling me about raves in moonlit fields.

My roommates said, Don’t go. They had both been to Auschwitz. They would never set foot in Germany.

But I would go to him, that was the only thing I knew.

Each day they said, Don’t go.

I wrote down everything that happened to me that year—­May 1996 to May 1997—­but I lost the journal on the metro in Prague. This happened some days after I left Christoph in Germany. When I got off the train and realized I did not have the battered notebook, I sat down and cried. Trains sped by me in the tunnel. The air was hot and thick. People poured out of the doors and walked past me, avoiding my eyes. I would have done the same.

Edition details

• Publisher: Pantheon
• Publication date: 2025
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0593701909
• ISBN 13: 9780593701904
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 256