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It has taken ages to read this book!

It’s not that long, only 300-odd pages, but it is long-winded and unnecessarily untidy and confusing in structure.  It’s a family saga trying not to be one, by fracturing the story into different time frames.  It starts in 2001, retreats to 1951, then 1989, and so on, flipping through the 50s, 60s and 70s, with six segments on 1 October 1989 i.e. Wilhelm’s 90th birthday, occurring just before the fall of the Berlin Wall and the dissolution of the USSR.

Each generation represents an era in East German history.  As you can see in the trailer below, old Wilhelm Powileit is an unreconstructed proponent of communism, and on his birthday and at Christmas (and a funeral) the generations come together.  There is his son Kurt Umnitzer, sent to the gulags for criticising the non-aggression pact between Nazi Germany and the USSR, eventually released into exile in the Urals for the best years of his life.  He returns with a Russian wife, Irina, and becomes an historian of the GDR. (Ironically, his attempts to memorialise the GDR end with his own lapse into senility.) Wilhelm’s grandson Sasha defects to the West  just before the fall of the wall, abandoning his son Markus, born from a brief liaison with Melitta who — with her mini-skirts and bourgeois courtesies — represents the advent of values and consumerism from the west.

Wilhelm and his wife Charlotte are introduced during their exile in Mexico, from which they return when East Germany becomes a Soviet state. They are characterised as cantankerous in their own ways, resistant to change and not particularly fond of each other.

There’s not much nostalgia in this novel, and Kurt’s wife Irina tempers her nostalgia for her homeland in Siberia where she was a potato farmer with memories of its privations. She is the subject of set pieces in the kitchen: for Christmas she cooks a Burgundian Monastery Goose from a lavish 300-year-old recipe…

Apart from the Burgundian goose, the cooking for Christmas Day was all German.  There was red cabbage and green cabbage, as well as Thuringian dumplings (the most complicated of all kinds of dumplings to make), potatoes for Kurt who didn’t like dumplings, as well as a a good hearty radish salad for a starter, red fruit pudding for dessert, and home-made Christmas stollen to go with coffee at the end of the meal — and plenty of everything, because there was nothing Irina hated more than wondering whether there would be enough.  All through her childhood she had eaten half-rotten potatoes (because you ate the half-rotten potatoes first, with the result that you were always eating half-rotten potatoes); at the onset of winter, all through her childhood, she had looked forward to the first hard frosts, because only then was the thin pig that Granny Marfa had been feeding on kitchen scraps slaughtered—and then it was done in a hurry, because at outdoor temperatures of minus fifty degrees its trotters would have frozen in its sty, which was knocked together out of thin boards.

Poor pig, thought Irina. (p.178)

As anyone who’s ever done a traditional Christmas for the Family knows, it takes forever in the kitchen, and the text takes us through the entire process.  For Foodies, it’s actually quite interesting, but its purpose is to lay the groundwork for a subsequent family meal which symbolises the collapse of traditions along with the table and Irina’s sobriety. Flummoxed by a dazzling array of spirits available at the supermarket in 1991 — but with Armenian cognac no longer to be found  and her eyesight failing — she takes home a bottle of Single Malt without knowing what it is. As a heated political argument erupts between Sasha and Kurt, and the girlfriend Catrin attempts to escape by offering to help with the chaos in the kitchen, the reader can see how women so often bore the brunt of change on the home front.  Even a little thing like using tinned chestnuts instead of fresh disrupts Irina’s routine and she forgets to pre-heat the oven for the goose.

It is Irina who worries about what will happen to their pensions and whether they will be able to stay in their rented house.

The set pieces are the best parts of the novel.  Sasha’s visit to Mexico to discover himself by retracing his grandparents’ lives is tedious, and so is Markus’s drug-taking.  The author’s decision to relate the events of Wilhelm’s 90th birthday six times from different points-of-view is overkill, and even though each segment is signalled by the date, it was still confusing to keep track of the chronology and the characters who have different surnames even when they’re from the same family.

In Times of Fading Light won the German Book Prize in 2011, and was a bestseller in Germany.  These two things go together, because the prize is an initiative of the German publisher and bookseller industry.   I have previously read another winner, Kruso (2014), by Lutz Seiler, translated by Tess Lewis, set in 1989 when the fall of the Berlin wall was imminent. It was the first book I’d ever read from the former GDR, and as I said in my review Seiler’s novel almost breathes a yearning for freedom and the agony of the disappearances that characterised life under Soviet rule.  Ruge’s In Times of Fading Light is not quite in the same league in terms of depicting human pain, because even though its focus is on only one family, it casts its net too wide in creating characters as symbols and too few of them are really memorable.

In Times of Fading Light was released in 2017 as a film which apparently enjoyed moderate success.

Other reviews are at the Colorado State University and The Guardian.

Author: Eugen Ruge
Title: In Times of Fading Light (Zeiten des abnehmenden Lichts)
Translated from the German by Anthea Bell
Publisher: Faber and Faber, 2013, first published by 2011
ISBN: 9780571288571, pbk., 308 pages
Source: personal library, purchased from Readings $29.99