The Blind Side of The Heart by Julia Franck

His mother, Helene, takes decisive action. A train is due, heading a few miles west, taking Germans out of an area that is to become Poland. They walk down the tracks and board in a terrifying crush. The boy puts both arms around his mother, hoping never to be parted. The train stops. His mother tells him to stay where he is. And disappears.

The opening of Julia Franck's novel is among the most powerful in recent years, a narrative so assured that the reader is gripped, as the boy was by his mother's hand, until the writer drops it without warning. Winner of the German Book Prize, the story is based on family history and has been hugely praised in the German press for telling truths about an epoch around which even Günter Grass equivocated.

Franck's story is of one woman's life across half a century. Helene's father returns broken from the first war and her mother retreats into unreachable sorrow, the "blind side of her heart". There are silences, as in all German tales. Her mother never speaks of four stillborn sons, or of the Jewish family she left behind. Helene and her older sister, Martha, caring for damaged parents in a small provincial town, develop a mutual erotic dependency.

Martha takes to drugs and gay clubs. Helene, trying to save her from selfdestruction, loses touch with her own priorities. Her fiancé dies in an accident, Hitler comes to power and she assumes a new identity as the submissive wife of a Nazi road engineer, a builder of the New Europe who cannot forgive her for not being an Aryan virgin. Her son is the product of marital rape. Helene's human instincts find expression in a tireless vocation for nursing and a protective instinct for the boy. She is a good mother, up to the point where she needs to show love.

The narrative tone, slow and heavy as dumpling soup, is redolent of a German-ness that never changed through a turbulent century, any more than Helene does. She gets by with whatever she has got, a survivor, a heroine of sorts.

This is a great, big silencebreaker of a novel, a laser beam into the German darkness from a writer who, one feels, has a great deal more to say.

Synopsis by Foyles.co.uk

Amid the chaos of civilians fleeing West in a provincial German railway station in 1945 Helene has brought her seven-year-old son. Having survived with him through the horrors and deprivations of the war years, she abandons him on the station platform and never returns. Many years earlier, Helene and her sister Martha's childhood in rural Germany is abruptly ended by the outbreak of the First World War. Her father, sent to the eastern front, comes home only to die. Their Jewish mother withdraws from the hostility of her surroundings into a state of mental confusion. Helene calls the condition blindness of the heart, and fears the growing coldness of her mother, who hardly seems to notice her daughters any more. In the early 1920s, after their father's death, she and Martha move to Berlin.Helene falls in love with Carl, but when he dies just before their engagement, life becomes meaningless for her and she takes refuge in her work as a nurse. At a party she meets Wilhelm, an ambitious civil engineer who wants to build motorways for the Reich and to make Helene his wife. Their marriage, which soon proves disastrous, takes Helene to Stettin, where her son is born. She finds the love and closeness demanded by the little boy more than she can provide, and soon she cannot shake off the idea of simply disappearing. Finally, she comes to a shocking decision. "The Blind Side of the Heart" tells of two World Wars, of hope, loneliness and love, and of a life lived in terrible times. It is a great family novel, a powerful portrayal of an era, and the story of a fascinating woman.