Review by Booklist Review
Clark follows her celebrated biography of Sylvia Plath, Red Comet (2020), with a debut novel that uniquely captures a consuming young romance and entwines it with questions about memory and morality. American Anna meets German Christoph in the mid-1990s at Harvard as she finishes her senior year. Visiting him abroad, Anna grows more obsessed, despite her friends' warnings and his elusiveness. As they tour Germany, where WWII is both "everywhere" and "nowhere," we learn of their connections to it. Anna's grandfather saw and questionably documented atrocities as an American soldier. One of Christoph's grandfathers translated for Americans, while the fate of the other is less clear. The grandfathers take turns narrating in chapters that unveil dark truths and complement Anna and Christoph's intellectual conversations about history and the sanitization of war. Yet this never feels heavy-handed. The Scrapbook is an incredibly smart novel, with an intricate and perfectly paced depiction of a delicate and intense relationship. It's as if a Sally Rooney novel merged with Richard Linklater's film, Before Sunrise, with forays into history and humanity further deepening the experience.
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
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)
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Kirkus Book Review
A woman's love affair is shadowed by the legacy of a tragedy a half-century earlier. The first novel by literary critic and historian Clark--author ofRed Comet: The Short Life and Blazing Art of Sylvia Plath (2020)--is narrated by Anna, looking back at her relationship in the late 1990s with Christoph, a young German man. Anna is a budding English scholar graduating from Harvard, but Christoph, visiting a friend in Cambridge, waylays her broader ambitions with his charm and intellectual depth--much to the concern of her Jewish friends, who suspect he hasn't shaken off his family's toxic Nazi history. Christoph's grandfather served in Hitler's Wehrmacht during World War II, while Anna's grandfather was a U.S. soldier who helped liberate Dachau. (The scrapbook of the title refers to photographs of Holocaust victims he kept tucked away.) Does a family history of wealth that "came off the backs of murdered Jews" disqualify Christoph as a partner? How much does it cloud Anna's affections for him? As they struggle through a long-distance relationship, the two are forthright about the challenges they face on that front--Clark is thoughtful on postwar Germany's efforts to move beyond its Nazi past without ignoring it--but their relationship also faces some more conventional hassles in terms of betrayal and emotional distance. Clark writes about this milieu with grace and elegance, capturing Anna's emotional frustration in acute detail. That largely rescues the novel from a plot that sometimes feels forced and potted; flashbacks featuring the pair's grandfathers are rich in historic detail, but also feel pat. Still, Clark ultimately sells the idea that a present-day relationship can be shaped by forces that reside in a past we'd prefer to ignore. An imperfect but ambitious take on the intellectual love story. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
