This translation of the tale first published in Germany in 2008, has much bitterness, much introspection and is linked always to the women of the family past and present and the backyard garden.
Hagena offers us cleanly sculpted descriptions of a family living on the land in a small village.
When grandmother Bertha dies, she leaves Christa the land, Aunt Inga the stocks and shares, Aunt Harriet the money and the narrator, Iris, the house.
The settlements and relationships historical and current, between these four, provide the fabric for reflections on the power of attachment to land, to family and to friends and secret lovers.
Iris, reluctant to either sell or inhabit the house moves between remembering and forgetting and making connections that have been shadowy in her childhood.
In some deliciously lyrical pieces, we have Herr Lexow, sitting at the kitchen table, sighing into his milk, recalling coming to the garden at night and being hit by a falling apple. In the tender moments that followed, an old tree bloomed overnight and neighbourly relationships were altered.
Remembering her grandfather, Iris sees the importance of going to school and the reason for the insistence that she should gain higher qualifications, while at the same time there is some regret that he was a member of the Nazi party and became a soldier late in the war period. He spent time in a prisoner of war camp in Denmark, a German internment camp and finally, because he had been a party member, in an American denazification camp. Through all this her grandmother visited him, kept the small landholding going, retaining the milk cow, and had British soldiers billeted in the house.
The memories of this period are vivid and warm.
What we have is a social portrait of three generations of ordinary Germans: the grandparents; their three daughters, whose professions and love lives are presented in vivid vignettes; and the reflecting narrator, seeking to link segments and understand patterns of relationships, the granddaughter.
The garden and apple trees feature through sensory descriptions used as metaphors for moments in family lives.
In the final chapter, Iris is making apple puree - ''the warm sweet earthy aroma of cooked apples filled every corner of the house - even the beds smelt of it. It was a wonderful apple puree''.
- Willie Campbell is a Dunedin educator.
