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Was in jener Nacht geschah" von Katherena Vermette ist einer der eindrücklichsten und spannendsten Romane, die ich in letzter Zeit gelesen habe. Phoenix, a young woman who hides out at her uncle’s house, which is the hangout of other young women rendered skinny by their heroin addiction, has been in and out of juvenile detention and has no regular home. I know the speech and could do a word-perfect recitation, but closing her down when she’s in full flow is next to impossible. Members of this large, extended family, are no strangers to misfortune; they've had more than their share of drama over the years, but when they rally together to face their woes as one, past wounds begin to heal.
Stella (third generation), alone at home with her infant children witnesses a gang rape going on outside her window and is helpless to break it up or render assistance to the victim. A violent crime occurs in a small community that is an offshoot of the Métis Nation (in Manitoba, Canada. Stella McGregor, a young Metis wife and mother, is witnessing an assault on a stretch of land known as The Break, adjacent to her home. The boy in The Round House has that, too, but the reader feels his mother’s isolation so keenly that it changes the overall experience to my mind.
Despite the novel's flaws, there is no denying that Vermette is a great storyteller- and while I was left slightly underwhelmed by The Break, I'm glad that I read it and I look forward to reading more of the author's work. Zu Beginn fällt es schwer, sich einen Überblick zu verschaffen - da kann ich nur empfehlen, den Stammbaum am Ende des Buches im Blick zu behalten.
Well, no more than any other family, which is to say, quite a lot, but so is everyone else’s, so we’re fairly normal, really. In a more figurative sense, "break" refers to that short period of time in which we relax, and in which we can perfectly take the opportunity to have a cup of tea or coffee with one of the more than 60 small sweet creations that the great teacher Eric Ortuño has gathered in this book. Despite the horror of the assault, and the uncomfortable matters discussed, the book helped me gain a better understanding of the discrimination First Nations people face, and the generational trauma that appears impossible to escape.The Break begins when a young mother witnesses an assault being committed outside of her house on a snowy, isolated strip of land in Winnipeg’s North End. So, with that in mind, and mindful that I may also be the object of hate mail, let me try to do justice to this novel. TOO MANY CHARACTERS - I'm a big fan of the multi-character perspective and I understand that writing from the POV of 10 characters is a tremendous challenge and sadly, one I feel that Vermette fell slightly short of. I read this as part of the Traveling Sister Group and we had extremely varying thoughts and perspectives on this eye-opening story.
She points no fingers, just plots the story, person by person, memory by memory, until it is clear that we must give up the feeling of hopelessness that haunts the lives of these women. At the moment that the result of the violent act witnessed by Stella was revealed in the story, my heart almost stopped. When he invites her to a party one day, there’s a sense of dread about what the outcome is going to be. Having recently read The Round House, which takes an interesting perspective in terms of relaying the events from the perspective of a teenage son, I feel as though Vermette’s work was more “hopeful-but-not-exactly-hopeful” in the end, with the matter of resilience somehow shining through so fiercely that it carried me through the novel in a burst (with only one hiccup – you will probably guess where) whereas I set Erdrich’s novel down many times – although never considered leaving it there either (I am an Erdrich fan too). It has been used on thousands of tracks in many genres, making it one of the most sampled recordings of all time.
Vermette is careful with her characterisation, no black and white caricatures here including the perpetrator.
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