Memory, war, loss, and forgiveness: these are the features of award-winning novels. The Gift from Berlin, winner of the 2005 National Dutch Debut Prize, attempts to cram all of them between its covers.

The novel tells the story of Andreas, an aging German living with one of his sons in an abandoned B.C. mining town, where he grows trees and reflects on his life.His parents were travelling musicians, he married a famed soprano (a favourite of Hitler), and survived a brief Russian occupation of the estate he managed. And he is a character rife with personality flaws: selfish obsession with his mother; churlish treatment of his first wife and adopted son; indifference to Nazi atrocities; and relentless arrogance, a trait that is especially manifest when it comes to showing Canadians how to properly manage a forest.

Little is explained, sometimes to a fault. How, for example, did Andreas, an outstandingly strong and fit man, escape conscription into the German army? How did his wife, apparently alone, dismantle and carry down to her cellar a baby grand piano? But the sparseness suits other elements, such as the despair Andreas’s wife feels at the end of the war over her new, less privileged situation. 

This is a sad novel, not in its content, but in the lack of meaning at the end of it all. A world war behind him, bereft of family, Andreas’s memories hold out the promise of considered reflection, but in fact only recount events. This is not a novel of redemption – destruction and ruination continue unabated – and Andreas, our protagonist, learns nothing from his experience. Just as Andreas passively watched the Russians roll across his land, he stands by as B.C. l0ggers move “in an iron cloud of noise, stench and splashing snow.”

The Gift from Berlin is beautifully written but, sadly, meaningless.