NL - In Search of a Name

[Orgeluse, Contemporary reads]

This thread is for the discussion of our Mar/Apr 2022 read of the Dutch novel In Search of a Name: A Novel by Marjolijn van Heemstra.

The novel was first published in 2017.


Feel free to discuss anything you like or dislike about the book! The following questions might get you started:

What made you want to read the book? - In how far can you relate to the topic?

[Orgeluse, Contemporary reads]

I started our group read yesterday as an audio read and made good progress.
I am wondering why it is sold as a novel - to me it comes across more as an autobiographical account of an incidence in the author's life?!?
Apart from this, I can already say that - curiously enough - it is unexpectedly topical...

[Valerie]

I think it is considered to be an 'autofiction', which is a genre that has recently become very popular again in the Dutch literature.

[Orgeluse, Contemporary reads]

Valerie wrote: "I think it is considered to be an 'autofiction', which is a genre that has recently become very popular again in the Dutch literature."

This term fits well as I am currently thinking about what are the fictitious parts in this book. So far I guess the boyfriend's/husband's attitude and comments might be fictitious as I feel they primarily serve the purpose of carrying the plot forward :))
Apart from this minor criticism I really like this autofiction (will continue and finish it this weekend), so thanks again for nominating it!!!

[Valerie]

Orgeluse wrote: "Valerie wrote: "I think it is considered to be an 'autofiction', which is a genre that has recently become very popular again in the Dutch literature."

This term fits well as I am currently thinki..."

I am glad you are enjoying it. I am hoping to get to it soon.

[Orgeluse, Contemporary reads]

I finished this today and I can report back that the audio version worked extremely well for me and that I very much liked this book for all sorts of reasons!
For those who have not yet decided on reading it there is pace to the plot and a certain degree of suspense as the pregnant female narrator has to figure out whether or not the name of the family hero is really suitable for her yet unborn son with less and less time left for her to come to a decision.
The novel is also rather topical and raises a lot of questions suitable for discussion...

[Maria]

I read this book a few months ago because I've been on a Vergangenheitsbewältigung roll. For those of us who don’t speak German, that term vaguely translates to “the struggle to overcome the past" or "working through the past” and, at least in books, refers to literature that deals with the aftermath of WWII. This is, for some reason, one of my favourite genres, books coping with the trauma and cruelty of humans in a collective guilt scenario, and I’ve read some very good books in the genre in the past few years (most recently 'A Little Annihilation' by Anna Janko, very recommended).

There were many things I loved about this book, many philosophical tidbits, moral questioning, that sort of thing. Plenty good quotes. I also loved the ending and the structure of the chapters based on pregnancy weeks, which I thought was quite original.

However, I did find the narrator / author a little rude sometimes (did she apologise after yelling to the old man?) and there were also some suggestions of genealogical research blasphemy, ex.keeping public historical records. As a genealogical enthusiast myself, that was a big no-no and horrified me haha.

Overall, it was a good book!

----

Despite it being an interesting read, I can't say I relate to the author's perspective on discovering she has an unsavoury family member. This intense desire for her relative to be "good" is similar to the author Nora Krug's opinion in her book "Belonging". If you're going to name your kid after him it might be more personal, but the result doesn't change history. The people they hurt and killed were still hurt and killed regardless of whether the perpetrator is your relative or someone else's. Discovering the bad people in your family allows you to learn about their victims, it helps that their stories won't be lost to history, and that is ultimately a positive thing. Sometimes, knowing you have a bad relative will be more important than desperately wishing for them to be a "good guy".

A mindset the author struggles with is whether to feel empathy with her relative or to separate herself from him and push him away. But I think the people who fought on the wrong side of the war aren't "other". They're us, they could be us, any of us. We ourselves could have had those beliefs if we were born in a different time or setting. I believe dehumanising them and seeing them as separate to us stops us from admitting what each of us could be capable of. My opinion is more along the lines of: yes, I could potentially be capable of real true cruelty, so what am I going to do to make sure that doesn't happen? How will I acquire the skills to pick apart propaganda, how to empathise with people I may dislike or even hate, how can I make sure I am doing the right thing? We all have more similarities than differences simply for being human, so we should be aware of the dangers of those similarities rather than seeing nazis as inherently different to us.

On the distress the author feels at having a bad relative... It is sad to learn that someone we respect(ed) wasn't the person we believed them to be. The question is: who are we going to be thanks to that knowledge?

[Valerie]

I am glad I finally got around to reading this book; I had heard about it but had never gotten to it despite the fact that books that deal with the morel dilemmas of war are cat nip to me.

Like you Maria, I didn't particularly gel with the author to the extent that I found her desire to cling to a black-white thinking in terms of guilt and who was a 'bad' or 'good' person during the war a bit annoying and naive. But beyond that aspect, I enjoyed the pacing, the accessibility of the writing and the reflection on morality and the gap that can exist between moral values in war and the moral values with which we look back on past wars.

The mis(construction) of historical memories through families is also something that I found fascinating about the story. I do wish that van Heemstra had explored herself with a bit of a more critical why by asking herself the question 'why does it matter to me so much to me that our family myth should be true'. That would have really given an extra dimension to the book.

Especially since I think there might be a link between her emotional resistance to the idea that her uncle did 'bad' and the continued dominance in Dutch society of a historical narrative which sees the Resistance during WWII as purely 'good'. I would therefore really recommend the book to people as I think it opens the door to discussions about the more moral grey areas of the Resistance (without denying their bravery in defying the German occupier).

[Orgeluse, Contemporary reads]

Maria wrote: "I read this book a few months ago because I've been on a Vergangenheitsbewältigung roll. For those of us who don’t speak German, that term vaguely translates to “the struggle to overcome the past" ..."

Thanks for pointing out A Little Annihilation by Anna Janko. I can highly recommend Sabine Bode's series of non-fictional books on children of war (WWII), their children and grandchildren. In these books, her focus is on the impact of war on children's education, their personal development, their relationships and on the impact of war on even the third generation (the war's grandchildren). Unfortunately, these books are only available in German.

I also thought the narrator came across as rude at some points and I also thought her obsession with her uncle simply having to be the good one was - especially towards the ending - over the top (culminating in her flying to Spain in the last weeks of her pregnancy).

I can only explain her clinging to a heroic uncle and her desire to name her child after an unknown family member as a strong girlish romanticisation. In my opinion she has, as a young girl, fallen victim to her dying grandmother who passed her this uncle's ring and made her promise she would name her child after this uncle. I really asked myself what kind of character this granny was, as she turns out to be the only one who really seems to have idealized this uncle, the other family members apparently were not that keen on him as it turns out in the course of the story ...
The general desire to name children (basically male ones!) after family members is something I personally find extremely odd and as it was generally done to establish / maintain the male power structure in a family and often meant suppressed individualism, I feel this conservative thinking is weird with regard to a contemporary female narrator (not to say author) and I would be interested in the underlying psychology beyond the assumption of an unknown "heroic" uncle who - it is known from the start - had killed (!) people ...

Another aspect the book brought up but did not deal with any further is the inability of (mercenary) soldiers to adjust to society in times of peace after they have experienced that the violence they exerted in times of war was justified and honoured by the same society.

All in all a good book with inconsistencies but lots of food for thought!

[Valerie]

Orgeluse wrote: "Maria wrote: "I read this book a few months ago because I've been on a Vergangenheitsbewältigung roll. For those of us who don’t speak German, that term vaguely translates to “the struggle to overc..."

I agree that it would have been nice if the book had explored a bit more the phenomenon of former resistance fighters struggling to return to civilian life.

[Carolien]

I finally read this one this past week. For various reasons I could relate to the narrator's position. Firstly in the South African context, there have been numerous examples of anti-apartheid heroes who also had committed various atrocities to their fellow fighters in ANC camps overseas, etc. So this situation feels familiar in a modern, national context to me.

In terms of family legends involving heroes and contested legacies, there's my great-great-great-great ( I think it should be 4) grandfather who is regarded as a hero by a lot of Afrikaners in South Africa for declaring war against Great Britain in 1899. Until 1994 his birthday was a public holiday in South Africa. As a child I was brought up on the hero version only realising years later that he and I would not have gotten along as he was very much a xenophobe, racist and damn stubborn. I'm still not sure how I should regard him as part of the family narrative.

I agree that choosing names for children is fraught with difficulties. We deliberately decided NOT to name our children after any grandparents or other family as I didn't want to debate on why we would choose one name and not someone else's.