Books we like ... and books we're not too fussed about
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Andrea Maria Schenkel (transl. by Anthea Bell)
Quercus 2008
This gripping novella was full of resonances for me. Like The Suspicions of Mr Whicher, it is about a murder in a country house. However, here the house is not in Victorian England but in Bavaria. As in The Beacon, the story centres on a remote farmhouse. As in In Cold Blood, the murders depicted are brutal and multiple, and the story based on real events, although here the original 1920s setting has been transposed to the 1950s. The Murder Farm, however, is by no means a pastiche. Through testimonies from various villagers, a clear and detailed picture is built up both of the victims’ lives and the atmosphere of a country gradually coming to terms with its dreadful past in the bleak years of the early 1950s. The plot is well handled and the final twist certainly came as a surprise to me. It reads well too; the translation is a good one, I think. The only thing which (slightly) lets it down is a bit of rather trite moralising at the end. Otherwise this is an excellent novel which deserves the same success here that it had when it was originally published in Germany three years ago.
25th January 2009
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrea_Maria_Schenkel
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