Set in the 1990s when Anna, an innocent Harvard senior, falls hard for Christoph, a beautiful German exchange student, this novel explores a life-changing seduction, and how the traumas of the past, particularly the aftershocks of fascism, echo and reverberate through the present. Along with Anna's perspective as she travels back and forth to Germany to deepen her relationship with the elusive Christoph, key chapters follow both of their grandfathers during the war, as Clark evokes their contrasting experiences, whose implications bear on the present story.
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.
Immersive ... Clark invests even more in her characters’ conversations about the politics and landscape of Holocaust memory. The bibliography appended to the novel shows how deeply she has steeped herself in the subject ... It helps to remember the pull of youthful, hormone-fueled love based on magnetic, perhaps ineffable attraction ... An open-ended epilogue offers a glimmer of hope that love may yet overcome history.
