Pleasure: A Novel in Stories

Mimi’s mother is the German daughter of a reluctant Third Reich infantry conscript. Her father is the Hungarian Jewish son of concentration camp survivors. Haunted by ghosts from their ravaged European past, the family settles in the arcadia of a Midwestern American suburb where, no matter what they do, they will never quite fit in. In Eva Marer’s posthumous novel, the eerily sensitive child narrator’s navigation of three cultures – American, German and Hungarian – is complicated by her capacity to remember things she herself never lived. Among Marer’s papers was this description of the book: “History demands that we never forget, and yet we have forgotten. But some remember what they have never seen. This is the conundrum faced by the novel's seven-year-old protagonist, Mimi, who, as the narrative opens, is unable even to articulate her conflict: What is it to live a memory that is not your own?” In a strikingly original take on the classic immigrant tale, love infuses history in such a way that, rather than being blunted or subdued with time, it takes on new life in the febrile mind of a overly imaginative child whose impassioned empathy for her father makes her feel his past suffering even more fervently than her own.