If you’re willing to wink at the incongruity, the novel does offer a flying tour of literary representations of the Holocaust and its legacy...as well as a meditation on the cost of political crimes to a nation’s trustworthiness and honor, even generations later.
Heather Clark is an accomplished writer of literary history, and the simplicity of the premise of her debut novel proves deceptive ... Sentence by sentence, Clark builds Anna and Cristoph’s dynamic—sexy, slightly masochistic, and always propulsive. Her reserved, elegant prose nails the rending, intoxicating nausea of first love without being cloying.
Phenomenal ... Worthy of reading and rereading, serving up romance, history and political philosophy in ways that could hardly be more relevant ... Unique blend of literary and historical fiction as well as a penetrating exploration of philosophy, art, historical responsibility and guilt in the context of war. It’s quite a combination, especially considering how immensely readable and compelling this book is ... Several arresting chapters narrate the wartime experiences of the grandfathers, integrating them seamlessly into the larger narrative while heightening the connections that Anna and Christoph draw between past and present ... Clark artfully addresses numerous weighty subjects.
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.
Clark deftly interweaves Anna and Christoph’s interactions with glimpses of their grandfathers’ lives during the war, adding depth to the story ... Clark is at her best when the novel explores the burden of Germany’s past through the couple’s examination, 50 years after the war, of the Holocaust’s enduring impact.
Potent ... 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.
An imperfect but ambitious take on the intellectual love story ... 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.
