The Discontinuity of Small Things
- Book Review,
by Kevin Haworth
From Publishers Weekly
Nazi-occupied Denmark provides a tumultuous backdrop for this thoroughly imagined debut that chronicles a chapter of the Holocaust from the perspective of a range of Copenhagen citizens. Meet Hannah Bergstrom, the pensive daughter of a once-wealthy Jewish businessman who has begun to question her bourgeois upbringing, embrace Zionism and dream of life in the Promised Land. Aging fisherman Carl Jensen spies troubling events along the unforgiving coastline, culminating during a late-night trawl when he witnesses a luxury liner conveying Jewish passengers from Norway to Germany. His wife, Jette, has suffered three miscarriages and hopes to adopt a baby from fleeing Jews. Haworth also builds suspense with supporting characters, including two young medical students, Henrik and Bakman, one heroic and one fearful, whose roles gradually expand as they plot to keep Danish Jews safe from escalating Nazi atrocities. This engrossing historical novel details a bright spot in a dark era, and readers will be heartened by good-hearted Danes' everyday heroic deeds. Agent, Michele Rubin. (May) Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
Melissa Pritchard, author of LATE BLOOMER and DISAPPEARING INGENUE
...a meticulously researched, gorgeously realized novel that cries out to be read...
Book Description
This quiet story of the Holocaust chronicles the lives of several Danes through the summer of . It is the discontinuity of small things--the scattered inconveniences, chance meetings, glimpses of injustice, and indulgences of hope,--that haphazardly directs each individual to his fate. An hypnotic story of ordinary people caught in a silent maelstrom, ultimately driven to extraordinary feats.
From the Author
"In truth he had never seen a German. In truth he did not know where Germany was. The only evidence he had that a war existed were the limitations on fishing, and, one night, while tossing his toilet water into the ocean, a brief glimpse of a periscope in the water." These lines, from an eight-year-old notebook, are the first evidence that I would try to produce a novel about Denmark during the war. The "he" is someone the book refers to obliquely as the Faeroese, or the Faeroe Islander – a nameless, mute figure who nonetheless provided me with an entrance into this story. I’m glad that the lines made it nearly unchanged into the published version. He’s always been at the core of the book for me, though he receives very few pages. He slides in and out of neighborhoods, pilfers from dead bodies, trades in chickens, eats moldy bread. He is capable of brutality – see the whale hunt – and something very like kindness. He is the stranger come to town – a classic plot line that underlies everything from The Iliad to Superman (that "strange visitor from another planet," the 1950s television narrator declaimed.) Though the novel features one Jew, a young woman named Hannah, the Faeroe Islander often strikes me as the most, well, Jewish – everywhere an outsider, infinitely adaptable. He is both my alter ego and my opposite. I couldn’t have done it without him.
From the Inside Flap
After the German invasion of 1940, the occupation of Denmark proceeds with a type of bruising normality that suffuses the lives of ordinary people. Many live in denial, clinging to the idea that civility, a non-confrontational nature, and the supposition of reason limit the possibilities for peril. Kevin Haworth's breathtaking novel chronicles the lives of several Danes through the tenuous summer of 1943. It deftly conveys the life-altering impact of military occupation, ironically described by the Germans as a "great understanding" between themselves and the Danish government. The Discontinuity of Small Things is a subtle story of fate, of interruptions, and of simple, everyday hardships. In Denmark, the "lovely country by the sea", citizens are subject to the disquieting strictures of martial law: the accumulation of deprivations haphazardly prods them toward moments of astonishing courage, humiliating cowardice, and affecting sorrow. By skillfully rendering the overlap of memory, apprehension, and impulse, author Kevin Haworth reveals a consciousness that brims with immediacy and longing. Written in a style that is both spare and hypnotic, The Discontinuity of Small Things offers a moving account of individuals caught in a silent maelstrom, ultimately driven to extraordinary feats. It marks the emergence of a significant new voice in historical fiction.
About the Author
Kevin Haworth was born in Brooklyn, NY in 1971. He earned his B.A. in English from Vassar College and his M. F. A. in Fiction Writing from Arizona State University. A two-time resident of the Vermont Studio Center, he is also a winner of the David Dornstein Prize for Young Jewish Writers and the Permafrost Fiction Prize. He currently teaches Writing and English Literature at Ohio University.
Excerpted from The Discontinuity of Small Things by Kevin Haworth, Quality Words in Print. Copyright © 2005. Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
The Faroese walks, directed by wind and scent. He slept that morning in one of Copenhagen’s public parks, next to a monument that, like all Copenhagen’s monuments, has been walled in against the bombs that have not come and will not come. The monument, finished in 1829, depicts one of Frederick VI’s effete sons balanced precariously astride an armored horse. The son would have preferred a sculpture with one of his beloved clocks, of which he commissioned no fewer than sixteen hundred from the royal clockmaker and sent the united kingdoms of Denmark and Norway into a debt that only a war with Sweden could alleviate. But his father demanded a horse. After falling off a cart pony three times the prince posed straddling a low fence and the sculptor carved the horse from memory. Even then the sculptor’s practiced fingers could not fully erase the look of surprise from the prince’s face. The sculptor neglected to affix the prince’s name to the statue and thus that has fallen into history. The Faroese slept last night warmed by the bricks surrounding the statue, the armored charger lurching forward, any moment, to crush him. Now he walks down a treeless hill and, subtly, away from the light and into the voluntary ghetto. Jews mostly, but not exclusively: Gypsies, Turks, Czechs, Kazakhs, the wide range of damaged Europe. The air is thick with vernacular tongues. Smell bumps into smell like crowds at a boxing match. A game of backgammon between two Arab men on the sidewalk determines marriages of four future generations. They have come from Germany, many of them, but not only; Germany is not the only country that knows how to create refugees. To the Faeroese the voluntary ghetto seems constructed entirely of glass; not literally, of course, because in fact hardly any glass exists anymore amongst the storefronts and what glass remains is covered with a thick grease to discourage rock-throwing. Instead he thinks of glass now because of an episode from his childhood. He lived with his mother and father in a sod house on a barren outcropping near a Faeroe Island town of little consequence. All of their belongings were distressingly simple. Only one glass decanter filled with whale oil stood out among an unending line of wooden cups and stone cookware. One day he arrived home to find that his two elder brothers had drowned; their boat capsized in a squally and they floated in to shore, two days later, empurpled and swollen. The boy watched as his mother lifted the glass decanter over her head. The whale oil soaked in golden window light and on the decanter’s curved front two mermaids held each other in affection or fear. His mother said, Don’t hold yourself anything precious in this world. It will only leave you. And with her left hand smashed the decanter against the table. The Faeroese thinks of this--the temporality of all things--as he walks through the voluntary ghetto, but of course he cannot articulate that and so he imagines every single person in the ghetto packed into the glass decanter and soaked in whale oil. Under an awning he comes across two Jewish boys beating a third for his parents’ egg money. He separates them by the shoulders. They run off, three together, to resume somewhere else. A Gypsy woman whose handkerchiefs and skirt and three scarves hang about her like air pushes to his nose a bag of spices that recalls pashas and sheiks and a 14th century massacre in Albania. He turns down a side street. He walks alone for several minutes, amidst hanging laundry and boarded windows. He encounters a beggar whose clothes seem stitched together from a dwarf’s wardrobe. The beggar offers him the memorbuch of the Jewish community of Sulzbach, Bavaria, in which are recorded 1,516 deaths, 724 births, twenty-three pogroms and two false messiahs. For a heel of bread he can add his name to the list. All of this is lost on the Faeroese because, as previously said, he cannot read. After handing him the book the beggar slumps against a doorway. After another moment he slips to the ground, asleep or dead, it is impossible to tell. The Faeroese puts the book under the beggar’s head, leaves him there. Later, when the street cleaners come, the beggar will be hauled off and buried and the book will be cut up and pulped and remade into propaganda pamphlets and papers that fall from the sky. The Faeroese sleeps that night in a doorway. When he thinks of food, a woman two stories above will throw down three slices of moldy bread. They taste to him just fine.
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