Book Review: In the Garden of Beasts by Erik Larson

First of all, for those of you who are less interested in my book reviews (CJTW, this might mean you…), fear not, this week will have a plethora of other posts on topics like: Das Baby’s first vacation, the summer of love, a furniture buying bonanza at White Home Collections in the great state of New Hampshire (live free or buy excessive quantities of cheap shabby chic vintage stuff…or both), and more!

If there’s one thing the Hipster Hausfrau reads a lot of, it’s Nazi books. Not because she’s likes Nazis (she hates them, duh), but because her book is about her grandmother’s role in the Nazi resistance. Back when she stored a lot of her books in the dining room, her guests had to look at shelf after shelf of books about concentration camps, partisan fighters, and Hitler. Certainly less appetizing than blue paint.

So when she learned that Erik Larson, of Devil in the White City fame (full disclosure: HH is probably the only person in America who hasn’t read this book) had written a book about the Dodd family in Germany during the early days of Hitler’s ascension to power, she was excited to see what the famed author had unearthed and rendered about the lives of the two Dodds in particular–Ambassador William and his daughter Martha–who had come to feel like old acquaintances whom you always enjoy bumping into at a party.  If that party were disturbingly attended by a coterie of brown-shirted thugs wearing swastikas, bad haircuts, and a loathing of Jews, socialists, and liberty.

Larson’s In the Garden of Beasts (464 pp. Crown. $26.00) is masterful, even to someone who feels like they’ve read a ton of books about this history, and it has as much to offer to someone who only knows the broad outlines of this time. It’s a sad but true reality that many people feel over-saturated with so-called Nazi books; a constant warning in my grad program was that I had to be aware of readers’ Holocaust/Nazi fatigue. Offensive, but true. Larson deftly dodges this issue by focusing his book on the early days of Hitler’s regime, and by creating compelling and balanced portraits of all of the figures. History offers us a black and white view of this era because on a grand scale, the morality (and immorality) were clear. But on an individual basis, as Ambassador Dodd discovers, “this new world…prov[ed] to be far more nuanced and complex than…expected.” Larson offers up this texture so that we can feel what it was to live in this world, the constant terror of violence, but the constant hope that things might improve, that Hitler might be checked, that his manifesto laid bare in Mein Kampf might be an exaggeration of his goals and philosophy. We know, of course, that there was no such luck, but it is a testament to Larson’s skill as a writer that he perches us on the precipice of history, hoping things might be different.

At its core, In the Garden of Beasts is the story of the somewhat frustrated career of Ambassador William Dodd, an academic, rather than the typical embassy old-boy, sent to Nazi Berlin to represent American interests. The task proves impossible, of course, but even more difficult is convincing the Americans at home of the grave danger presented by Hitler. Regarded as nebbish, embarrassingly frugal, and lacking in the necessary smooth manners of a traditional ambassador, he realizes fairly quickly the impossibility of maintaining diplomatic relations in a country where American visitors were not infrequently beaten for failing to issue the Nazi salute. But it is a slow education for Dodd, who arrives in Germany bursting with the ideals he formed as a graduate student there years prior. With painstaking and vivid detail, Larson takes us through Dodd’s transforming beliefs, from being a man who diffidently “read a brief statement that emphasized his sympathy for the people of Germany and the nation’s history and culture” to becoming “one of the few voices in the U.S. government  to warn of the true ambitions of Hitler and the dangers of America’s isolationist stance.”

The other star of the book is Martha Dodd, the Ambassador’s vivacious and frankly rather wild twenty-five year old daughter. It is Martha who really gets out into the world of Nazi Berlin, and she too, must undergo a drastic change, from believing in the Teutonic Nazi ideal to seeing their insidious truth. Among those who participate in her education are several lovers (and too much, frankly, is made of her having several lovers), among them Rudolf Diels, a surprisingly moral early Gestapo chief, and Boris Winogradov, a Soviet embassy official whom we ultimately learn is a spy. Larson’s fixation on Martha’s being “frankly sexual” is a distraction from her storyline, and is reminiscent of postwar attempts by both the Americans and Soviets to discredit women who resisted the Nazis by labeling them as sexually voracious bisexual sluts (to be blunt!).

Larson’s storytelling is richly woven with novelistic narrative details that pull us wholly into this world, as when Harvard graduate and senior Nazi official Putzi Hanfstaengl is described as having a “voice [that] stood out like thunder over rain.” Perhaps the most chilling moment in the book is when Hafstaengl introduces Martha to Hitler, in a failed attempt to engage his leader’s sexual appetite. Martha finds him “peaceful and charming,” “modest, middle class, rather dull and self-conscious–yet with this strange tenderness and appealing helplessness.” Knowing what we know, it is an unnerving exercise to try to make this image fit with the Hitler who would destroy much of Europe.

Ultimately, I recommend this book not just for its historical portraits, but for its engaging, suspenseful storytelling and nimble prose. It’s not just an account for those fascinated by Nazi times: it’s for everybody! A great example of the power of well-rendered nonfiction.

I feel gross rating a Nazi book with strollers, but that’s what I’ve set myself up to do.

5 Strollers! Roll right out to your local bookseller and pick this one up!

Book Review: State of Wonder, by Ann Patchett

Now doing book reviews is risky, because it implies to the world that I have copious amounts of leisure time, which I assure you, I do not. But one of Das Baby’s special traits is that he still has to eat every three hours, but he also sleeps though the night, leading to something we call Schlaffessen, or sleep eating. So while I sit there holding a bottle (more later on why he has to take breast milk from a bottle) in his mouth at 3 am, I like to read. Still, know that I write this review at personal risk because Herr Husband may use it against me next time I claim I don’t have time to shower.

Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness is one of my favorite books, and it was my favorite book to teach: densely packed with philosophy, teeming with the kind of evocative prose that makes an English teacher go all weak in the knees, and as ambiguous as life itself. The perfect book for young people who are obsessively charting their place in the world. Yes, it’s racist, but 1) Everybody’s a little racist 2) It was written during a racist time (all times being racist, but that’s another story) and 3) Maybe it’s social criticism.

State of Wonder, by Ann Patchett (353 pp. Harper/HarperCollins Publishers. $26.99) both mirrors and inverts Conrad’s slim masterpiece, inserting women in both the Kurtz and Marlow roles, and centering around a moral core that is both simpler and more life affirming.

Marina Singh is a pharmaceutical researcher whose simple and structured life is upended by a letter from deep in the Brazilian rainforest reporting the death of her lab partner, Anders. Her boss (also her lover, though their attachment and attraction are rather hazy) wants her to go to Brazil to track down the information that Anders sought on the development of a drug that would indefinitely extend female fertility. Anders’s wife wants her to find out the truth about his death. And so Marina, unnervingly passive for much of the novel, finds herself swept along by the currents of others’ desires, eventually traveling upriver through the rainforest to see firsthand the research of Annick Swenson, who functions as a Kurtz-like figure in her uncomfortable moral certainty.

Once at Swenson’s station, Marina finds herself startlingly well-adapted to the life of the fictional Lakashi people. Patchett’s dehumanizing descriptions of these natives echo Conrad’s–the women’s compulsion to groom one another is likened to that of monkeys–and both uphold and critique these attitudes. “‘I tamed them,’ [Dr. Swenson says of the Lakashi], taking not the least discomfort in the word”.  Marina, with an Indian father and white American mother, blends in with the Lakashi–who like Conrad’s natives don’t enjoy the benefit of being named for the sake of individualization.  Only Marina’s height marks her as different, causing one tourist to remark, “Take my picture with this one…she’s twice the size of the rest of them”. The cringeworthyness of the scene is only slightly diminished by its ham-handed directness.

Patchett’s prose delights, particularly when she’s creating a sense of place. The jungle seethes, and I’ve never before read such brilliant writing about insects: “At dusk the insects came down in a storm, the hard-shelled and soft-sided, the biting and stinging, the chirping and buzzing and droning, every last one unfolded its paper wings and flew with unimaginable velocity into the eyes and mouths and noses of the only three humans they could find”.

But at times the plot shows too much of its undercarriage, relying on convenience and coincidence rather than smoothing down its edges. Annick and Marina’s intertwined past looms too large and too conveniently over the novel. And Patchett is obvious with leitmotif. Blindness and deafness and disabling anomalies abound in the story, and come to feel overdone in showing us how unaware we often are of each other’s motives and feelings. Marina’s lost luggage and cell phones similarly heighten this sense of disconnect.

And yet at its center, State of Wonder, the very title of which echoes Conrad’s novel in its cadence, offers us Wonder rather than Darkness. The characters are achingly human in a way that highlights their (and all of our) yearning to be good. For the novel has heart in the traditional sense, and while some human connections are lost, others are forged, uneasily upending Conrad’s message that “we live as we dream…alone.” For much of the novel, Marina is haunted by malaria-drug induced dreams of isolation and disconnection, but by the novel’s end, she has come to see the possibility for connection, love, and comfort.  It is this possibility that lies at the very heart of Patchett’s skillfully rendered novel, making it a worthy read.

So I give it four out of five strollers.  Worth taking for a spin.