I first heard of Irmgard Keun when I bought her novel The Artificial Silk Girl, which I liked a great deal. Here, Penguin gives us a later novel, published in exile just before the Second World War.
I hadn’t realised that Keun was Joseph Roth’s lover, including during the period over which she wrote this novel. Roth died in Paris only a year after Child of All Nations was written, destitute and drink-sodden, while Keun somehow survived the war having gone back to Germany. Subsequently she all but disappeared from view.
Chid of All Nations is a roman à clef, in that the adult characters correspond very closely with Roth and Keun, and the events are very close to those that they actually experienced. The little family are chased around Europe by debts, lies and the Nazis, with a brief trip to America thrown in.
The narrative centres on Kully, a precocious young girl – the couple’s daughter – who has become knowledgeable in advance of her years thanks, ironically, to parental neglect. Keun uses Kully’s immature perspective to show how incomprehensible the events of the late 1930s were. It’s a beautifully ironic style, and one that charms and amuses in equal measure. The father is entirely unreliable, in debt to virtually everyone he knows, absent for most of the time, and is constantly promising his publisher the completed text of his latest novel which, needless to say, is a mere figment of his unreliable imagination.
Child of All Nations is a brilliant novel, wonderfully translated by Michael Hofman, who has done so much to rehabilitate Roth’s work. I hope publishers will give us more of Keun’s work in translation. Event though it has the feeling of having been dashed off in no time at all – just like much of Roth’s work – Keun’s talent as a writer prevents it from ever becoming hackneyed or lazy. Her writing is both vibrant and poignant. It’s highly recommended.
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