Worterbuch (German Edition) Review

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Worterbuch (German Edition) ReviewThe English version of this German novel by Jenny Erpenbeck has been translated by Susan Bernofsky. I have not read the translation. It is sold as The Book of Words.
In the beginning was the Word. The heroine is lost in words and she can not find her way. We are in a literary puzzle. A young woman recollects her childhood. Her language is precise German with a distinct East German touch. We are in the head of the child. The child sees and hears things and tries to make sense of them.
Her upbringing is partly in German. We know that from the verbal `memes' (the term that Dawkins uses for cultural equivalents of genes) that the child finds or remembers or encounters: the rhymes, the songs, the prayers.
Many of these memes are the same that I grew up with, though I am 20 years older than the author Erpenbeck, and though I grew up near the Western borders of Germany, in the French occupied zone, not like she did in the formerly Russian zone, now (during her childhood) officially the German Democratic Republic, and in the present time an odd subject of contradictory memories and myths.
The places that the child lives in are of a mongrel kind. We seem to be in East Germany and then we seem to be in Argentina. Only her grandmother remembers snow. That must be her mother's mother. She came over the ocean, from far away. Mother has a brother and a sister, but her father has died. Snow covered the ground for months over there. The sun nearly always shines here.
The child's father did not come from Germany, his parents live in Argentina and are visited every year by train or car. Is the German background a deliberate obfuscation? Is Erpenbeck deliberately confusing these countries? Or is it not confusion, but fusion? Are we in a practical application of totalitarianism theory? We are certainly not in a realistic narration that we can take literally.
The girl's father, as we find out, has an important position and is friends with the men whose stone monuments stand in the parks. He is in charge of creating order. He is, in other words, torturer and murderer on a grand scale.
The child has a wetnurse (she drinks her milk until rather late), who takes the child to popular altars for a local saint, Difunta Correa. This is what wikipedia knows about Difunta:
According to popular legend, Deolinda Correa was a woman whose husband was forcibly recruited around the year 1840, during the Argentine civil wars. Becoming sick, he was then abandoned by the Montoneras [partisans]. In an attempt to reach her sick husband, Deolinda took her baby child and followed the tracks of the Montoneras through the desert. When her supplies ran out, she died. Her body was found days later by gauchos that were driving cattle through, and to their astonishment found the baby still alive, feeding from the deceased woman's "miraculously" ever-full breast. (end of quote from wiki)
Another hint at biological distance is that the girl's mother has blue eyes, while her own are black. We assume early on that the girl is adopted. She is very attached to her father. In the course of the story we learn fairly precisely what has happened, and she understands quite clearly what her father has done. She waits for him to be released from jail.
This short book is a fascinating text by a promising writer. I have been made aware of her by several reviews written by friends, and I have tried not to remember their opinions when writing this review. The narration is composed of short text pieces which require close attention. After all, we have to decypher different time levels from early childhood to young adulthood, and we need to sort out different places. People are either people or ghosts. Gun shots are fireworks or bursting tires or somebody killing rats or pigeons or stray dogs. Corpses are either buried under lawns or dumped into the ocean from airplanes.
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