Heather Clark's finely wrought first novel, The Scrapbook, captures the lingering melodrama of an international--and intellectual--romance in one's early 20s. Harvard grad Anna, the primary narrator, looks back at her year with Christoph, a handsome German student she meets in 1996 when he visits Cambridge, Mass., excavating what happened between them.
Clark (Red Comet) writes, "His beauty dazzled and destabilized me. I was in thrall to it and yet it weighed upon me. Things came too easily for him. I came too easily." Over the course of a year, Anna travels to Germany several times to see Christoph. When Christoph plays tour guide, taking her to Nuremburg, Hamburg, and Munich, among other places, he often points out where Germans have failed to reckon with the past by, for example, leaving a former Jewish quarter in Nuremberg unmarked.
Despite warnings from Anna's former roommates, who are Jewish and dislike Germans, Anna is smitten. Christoph, however, is more of an enigma, and part of the engine of this novel is tracking the subtle shifts between the two. The couple is attracted to each other through a shared interest in history. In fact, much of their conversation revolves around their grandfathers' respective roles in World War II, as well as thinkers such as Hannah Arendt and Theodor Adorno. The novel contains several sections set in the 1940s that follow those grandfathers on their sides of the war. The Scrapbook is a fascinating tangle of yearning, history, and legacy. --Nina Semczuk, writer, editor, and illustrator