Olga

by Bernhard Schlink, Charlotte Collins

Genres: Literary Fiction; 20th Century Romance

Synopsis

“Two world wars and the passage of more than a century do not overshadow [Bernhard Schlink’s] story of lovers who never fully belong to each other, just as they never fully belonged to the world.”—Booklist

“A brilliant novel about history and the nature of memory.”—Evening Standard

A sweeping novel of love and passion from author of the international bestseller The Reader about a woman out of step with her time, whose life is witness to some of the most tumultuous events of modern age.

Abandoned by her parents, young Olga is raised by her grandmother in a Prussian village in the early years of the twentieth century. Smart and precocious, endearing but uncompromising, she fights against ingrained chauvinism to find her place in a world run by lesser men.

When Olga falls in love with her neighbor, Herbert, the son of a local aristocrat, her life is irremediably changed. While Herbert indulges his thirst for exploration and adventure, Olga is limited by her gender and circumstance. Her love for Herbert goes against all odds and encounters many obstacles, but even when they are separated, it endures

Unfolding across decades—from the late nineteenth to the early twenty-first century—and across continents—from Germany to Africa and the Arctic, from the Baltic Sea to the German south-west—Olga is an epic romance, and a wrenching tale of a woman’s devotion to a restless man in an age of constant change. Though Olga exists in the shadows of others, she pursues life to the fullest and her magnetic presence shines—revealing a woman complex, fascinating, and unforgettable.

 Told in three distinct parts, brilliantly shifting from different points of view and narrative formats, Bernhard Schlink’s magnificent novel is a rich, full portrait of a singular woman and her world.

Translated from the German by Charlotte Collins 

Release date: September 21, 2021

Publisher: HarperVia

Print pages: 288

Sample

1

She’s no trouble; she likes just to stand and look.”

The neighbor the mother entrusted the child to didn’t believe it at first, but it was true. The girl, one year old, stood in the kitchen and looked at one thing after another: the table with the four chairs, the dresser, the stove with its pots and ladles, the sink that, with a mirror over it, was also the washbasin, the window, the curtains, finally the lamp hanging from the ceiling. Then she took a few steps, stood in the open doorway of the bedroom, and looked at everything in there as well: the bed, the bedside table, the wardrobe, the chest of drawers, the window and curtains, finally the lamp again. She regarded them with interest, although the layout of her neighbor’s apartment was no different from that of her parents, and the furniture was hardly any different either. When the neighbor thought the small, silent girl had seen all there was to see in the two-room apartment—the toilet was on the landing—she helped her up onto a chair beside the window.

It was a poor part of town, and behind each tall house was a cramped courtyard backing onto another house. The narrow street was packed with all the many people from the many houses, the tram, carts selling potatoes and vegetables and fruit, men and women selling trinkets and cigarettes and matches from hawker trays, boys selling newspapers, women selling themselves. Men stood on street corners waiting for an opportunity, any opportunity. Every ten minutes a pair of horses pulled a carriage along the tram tracks, and the little girl clapped her hands.

As she got older, the girl still liked to stand and look. It wasn’t that she had trouble walking; she walked nimbly and confidently. She wanted to observe and understand what was going on around her. Her parents scarcely spoke, to each other or to her. It was thanks to the neighbor that the girl had any words or phrases at all. The neighbor liked to talk, and talked a lot; she’d had a fall, couldn’t work, and often helped the girl’s mother out. When she took the girl outside, she could only walk slowly and had to keep stopping. But she talked about everything they saw, explained, taught, and expressed her opinion, and the girl couldn’t get enough of it; the slow walking and frequent stopping suited her just fine.

The neighbor thought the girl ought to play more with other children. But things could get rough in the dark courtyards and corridors of the building: if you wanted to assert yourself, you had to fight, and if you didn’t fight, you were bullied. The children’s games were preparation for the struggle for survival rather than fun. The girl wasn’t fearful or frail. She just didn’t like the games.

She learned to read and write before she went to school. At first the neighbor didn’t want to teach her, so that when she got to school she wouldn’t be bored. But eventually she did, and the girl would read whatever she found at her house: Grimms’ Fairy Tales, the tales of Hans Christian Andersen, and Hoffmann’s Shock-Headed Peter. She would stand and read for hours, leaning on the dresser or windowsill.

The girl would have been bored at school even if she hadn’t already been able to read and write. The teacher drummed the letters of the alphabet one by one with a cane into the forty schoolgirls, and the pronunciation, repetition, dictation, and transcription were tedious. But the girl eagerly learned arithmetic, so she could check the stallholders when she went shopping, and she liked to sing. The teacher also took the history class on trips, so the girl came to know the city of Breslau and its surroundings.

2

She came to know that she was growing up in poverty. Just because the school, a new redbrick building with yellow sandstone windowsills and pilasters, was nicer than the other houses in the district, it didn’t mean the other houses were run-down. The school was the school. But when the girl saw the stately residences on wide streets, the villas with their gardens, the magnificent public buildings and wide squares and parks, and when she breathed more freely on the riverbanks and bridges, she understood that the poor lived in her neighborhood and she was one of them.

Her father was a docker, and when there was no work at the docks, he sat at home. Her mother was a laundress; she collected laundry from upper-class households, carried it home in a bundle on her head, and returned it on her head again, washed and ironed and wrapped in a sheet. She worked day in, day out, but the work didn’t bring in much money.

The girl’s father had been shoveling coal for days on end with no time to sleep or change his clothes when he fell ill. Headache, dizziness, fever—her mother cooled his forehead and calves with a damp cloth. When she saw the red rash on his belly and shoulders, she grew alarmed and fetched the doctor. She too was dizzy and had a fever. The doctor diagnosed typhus and sent them both to the hospital. Their leave-taking from the girl was brief.

She didn’t see her parents again. She wasn’t allowed to visit them in the hospital in case she got infected. The neighbor took her in and kept telling her that her parents would get better until, after a week, the father died, and then, ten days later, the mother. The girl would have liked to have stayed with the neighbor, and the neighbor would have liked to have kept her. But the girl’s paternal grandmother decided to take her back to Pomerania.

Things were already not going well between them in the days her grandmother spent arranging the funeral, clearing the house, and deregistering the girl from school. The grandmother had disapproved of her son’s marriage. She prided herself on her Germanness and had rejected Olga Nowak as a wife for her son, even though she spoke fluent German. She had also disapproved of the parents’ naming the girl after her mother. When she became the girl’s guardian, her Slavic name would be exchanged for a German one.

But Olga refused to give up her name. When her grandmother tried to explain the disadvantages of a Slavic name and the merits of a German one, Olga stared at her in incomprehension. When her grandmother presented her with German names, from Edeltraud to Hildegard, that met with her approval, Olga refused to pick one. When her grandmother said that enough was enough and her name was Helga, almost the same as Olga, she crossed her arms, stopped speaking, and, when addressed as Helga, did not respond. This continued on the train journey from Breslau to Pomerania and for the first few days after their arrival, until her grandmother gave in. From then on, though, she regarded Olga as a stubborn, ill-mannered, ungrateful girl.

Everything was unfamiliar to Olga. After the big city, the small village and the wide-open countryside; after the girls’ school with its different classrooms, the mixed school with boys and girls all in one room; after the lively Silesians, the quiet Pomeranians; after her affectionate neighbor, her unfriendly grandmother; instead of the freedom to read, there was work in the fields and garden. She resigned herself to these things, as poor children do from an early age. But she wanted more than the other children: she wanted to learn more, know more, do more. Her grandmother had no books and no piano. Olga pestered her teacher until he gave her books from his library, and the organist until he explained the organ to her and allowed her to practice on it. When the pastor spoke disparagingly in Confirmation class of David Friedrich Strauss’s Life of Jesus, she persuaded him to lend her the book.

She was lonely. The village children played less than city children: they had to work. When they did play, their games were just as rough, and Olga was skillful enough to hold her own. But she didn’t really fit in. She longed for other children who didn’t fit in either. Until she found one. He too was different. Right from the start.

3

As soon as he could stand, he tried to run. One step at a time wasn’t fast enough for him, so he would lift one foot before the other had reached the ground, and fall over. He would get up, take one step, then another, feel he was too slow again, try to move one foot before the other had landed, and fall again. Get up, fall down, get up—he kept on, impatient, undaunted. He doesn’t want to walk, he wants to run, thought his mother, who was watching, and shook her head.

Even when he learned that his foot should only leave the ground once the other had reached it, he still didn’t really walk. He toddled in little scurrying steps, and when his parents put a harness on him and took him out on a lead, as was newly fashionable, it amused them that their little boy pranced like a pony as they strolled along. At the same time, they were a little embarrassed; the other children walked better in harness.

At the age of three, he ran. He ran all over the rambling house, through its three stories and two attics, down the long corridors, up and down the stairs, through the connecting rooms, over the terrace into the park and down to the fields and the forest. When he started school, he ran to school. It wasn’t that he had overslept or lingered over brushing his teeth and would have arrived late. He just liked to run instead of walk.

At first, the other children ran with him. His father was the richest man in the village; he provided food and wages for many families on his estate, settled disputes, helped maintain the church and the school, and made sure the men voted correctly. This made the other children look up to his son and want to copy him, until the respect the teacher showed the boy and the difference in his manners, language, and clothes alienated him from them. Perhaps they would have wanted him to be their leader, if he had wanted to be one. But he wasn’t interested—not because he was snobbish, but because he was willful. The others should play their own games; he would play his. He didn’t need the others. Especially not for running.

When he was seven, his parents gave him a dog. Because they admired everything British and revered Victoria, the widow of the Prussian emperor Frederick III, they chose a Border collie to accompany and protect their son as he ran. This it did, always running ahead, constantly glancing back, with a good instinct for where the boy wanted to go.

They ran on tracks through and around fields, on woodland paths and wide forest lanes, often cutting straight through the forest or across farmland. The son loved the open fields and the sunlit woods, but when the corn was high, he would run right through it to feel the ears on his bare arms and legs; he would run through the undergrowth so it could scratch and tousle him, and when it clung to him he could tear himself free. When beavers built a dam in the stream and made a pool, he ran through the pool. Nothing would hold him back, nothing.

He knew what time the train arrived at the station and what time it left. He would run to the station and run alongside the train until the last car overtook him. The older he got, the longer he was able to keep up. But that wasn’t why he did it. The train took him to the point where his heart couldn’t beat or his breath come any faster. He could get there on his own, but it was more enjoyable to be taken there by the train.

He heard the panting of his breath and felt the pounding of his heart. He heard his feet fall on the ground, surely, evenly, lightly, and in every fall there was a rise, and in every rise a hovering. Sometimes he felt as if he were flying.