This novel is rife with the little mysteries that too often go unsolved in our lives, and Staffel does a fine job of not including everything and the kitchen sink, instead concentrating on a few important, poignant events that have been unknown or unexplained for the small group of characters in the novel, and on which the story hinges. One very important pitfall this book happily avoids is the overabundance of family history/mysteries. I see this all too often in fiction by women writers (easy, now--men writers have their flaws, too) and I'm grateful it doesn't make an appearance in Notebook.
Likewise, Staffel chooses to concentrate on a small handful of important characters, not swamping the reader with too many names to remember. Each character is then allowed her or his own voice and portrayed vividly. Most central is Uta, the short, stout mother of two who survived the fire-bombing of Dresden and came to America, where quite by accident she found happiness on a farm with bookseller name William, who happened to be a dwarf. Though she dies before the events in the novel, we get to know her from others' accounts of her, as well as a few instances of her past, from her perspective. (Including her thoughts just before her untimely death; that chapter made me want to bawl like a baby.) William and Uta's daughter, Helene, miss her practically at every moment in their daily routines, despite her having been gone for two years, and it's essentially that hole that drives the story and brings the other characters, each of them driven by some form of loneliness, into the fold.
So many of the mysteries of our lives don't need to be, they simply result from a fear of finding out the truth, whatever it may be. The fear that whatever should be discovered will be worse than whatever has always been believed is a powerful one, and it prevents William from ever asking Uta's hand in marriage:
She wouldn't have answered right away because she wouldn't have known what the word meant. So then he would have had to explain it and while he did that he would have had to watch her face. He would have seen the moment when she understood, and the moment after that, he would have seen the answer, and he was scared because he had a feeling it wouldn't have been yes (111-112).
So often the characters' loneliness results in or from a kind of altruistic thought. For example, William feels that no one would want to live with him if they really had the choice, so he tries to tell Helene she can move one, as if this would do her good:
She looked up and in the low evening light he could see Uta's face behind hers. Uta had the same green eyes and grayish blond hair, the same wide cheeks.
"Go if you want," he said.
"But I don't want. I want to stay" (48).
This "Notebook of Lost Things" is Uta's account, written in the hard years of Germany's reconstruction after the war, of the things she remembered that no longer existed, primarily in Dresden. She scrawled them in a children's school journal in her small handwriting, and wrote of these things either so that they would not be lost altogether, or so that she would no longer have to torture herself with thoughts of them, to keep them alive. Helene finds the book as she goes through Uta's room clearing out her possessions, and has to recall her German in order to translate the parting gift of secrets from her mother.
Fiction calls for extremes. Notebook does a fine job of balancing the extremes of emotion and experience its characters endure with the seemingly mundane things in life that really are as important. A person who lives a happy domestic life isn't interesting, until you learn that she survived Dresden, and consequently is fearful of loss. A bookseller isn't a big deal, until you learn that he's a dwarf and didn't find happiness until a German immigrant and her children came into his store asking for help. A half-Mexican schoolgirl isn't interesting until you find out her mother is starving her nearly to death. A novel's characters don't have to fly to the moon or save the world to keep the reader interested, but there does have to be something compelling in its characters' lives, and that's what Staffel has provided here, though in the words of Helene, she seems perhaps a little conflicted about it: "Helene turned to him. 'Ordinary life doesn't have to be taken to its extremes to be interesting. Sometimes simple mysteries are more provocative' " (191-192). True, but it's surprising what kind of extremes the average person has had to live through. Anyone can know fear of failure and loneliness, which Staffel wonderfully captures in her novel.
All contents, except where otherwise noted, are copyright Andrew Lee Hunn.