A retired nurse, Tante (the german word for aunt, auntie) Eva is living in the Eastern part of Berlin, shortly after the Berlin Wall come down. She is lonely in a landscape - both as a concept and as a way of living - she does not recognize any more when skinheads are shouting on her and her former Stasi lover is turned into drug trafficker. Her life was not easy but she was trustful to the German Democratic Republic by default. There is a sister in America who betrayed her once and a niece coming to Berlin with a serious drug addiction.
I am interested, among many many other things, in books written by non-Germans authors set in Germany but in the case by Tante Eva by Paula Bomer the execution and some very embarassing errors disappointed me.
Let´s start with the worst. There are a couple of dialogues in German, unfortunately without a translation which will definitely render difficult the reading for many of the non-German readers in this world. This is not such a big problem, but some of the sentences sound awkward when are not copy pasted from a previous edition of the Google translate app. For instance, : ´Ich muss ein Shower nehmen´ (transl. ´I have to take a shower´).
Back to the story though. What I liked the most about Tante Eva was her love for jazz. There are not enough women that love music, especially jazz and music is not too present in literature nowadays therefore I was charmed but this connection. I was less charmed though by the fact that there are so many sparkle of potential stories all over the book and some interesting characters that they are lost in a narrative which is mostly plane. It´s like the characters are too heavy to carry on therefore they are domesticated in a very banal story that is completely wasting its potential.
And that´s all I can say about this book. I was stubborn enough to keep reading until the end, but maybe I should be more careful with my precious bookish reading time.
Rating: 2.5 stars
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