Sometimes when staying in a foreign city the physical estrangement you feel from your homeland can match your mental state. “How Pale the Winter Has Made Us” opens with its English narrator Isabelle learning that her father has committed suicide in Crystal Palace, London. She’s been staying in Strasbourg with her partner who has recently flown to South America for an extended trip to pursue his medical work. A typical response to such news would be for Isabelle to immediately fly home to England to attend the funeral and be with her remaining family. But instead she chooses to stay in her partner’s empty flat and roam the streets of Strasbourg researching the lives of people who’ve been memorialised in the city’s statues, museums, literature and photos found in the stalls of street vendors. She finds that “Grief does strange and terrible things to the mind; rationality disintegrates into the air.”
We only receive snippets of her own personal history with her family and partner, but these relationships are certainly strained. Amidst long passages of research there occasionally appear italicised hate-filled accusations from her mother (who she refers to as a “harridan”) which might be real messages, memories or entirely imagined. Occasional recollections of her father and his single-minded pursuit of painting are steeped in resentment. But throughout most of the narrative Isabelle blocks the intrusion of personal details in favour of her research. This process of consciously alienating herself from the reality back home and immersing herself in fragments from history is a way of avoiding the immediacy of emotion and searching for a way to centre herself again. As we follow her intellectual journey over the course of winter we witness an individual’s disintegration of self alongside the spectral resurrection of a city’s history.
Strasbourg has an interesting position being a French city situated so close to the German border and it acts as the nexus point for a number of European Institutions. It was also one of the first centres of the printing industry which was established in part during the 1400s by Johannes Gutenberg, one of the figures Isabelle extensively researches. She reads about and interviews a series of people concerning the lives of artist Jean Arp, Goethe and several other individuals connected to the city. This information is conveyed through dialogue but also photos which are reproduced in the book. These elements of the city contribute to the way Isabelle methodically maps out not only the physical space around her, but its politics and culture throughout the centuries. In doing so she in a sense become the city: “The streets were now mapped over my skin more than I had ever felt before, visibly rising on my flesh.”
Isabelle also quite literally engages with a mythological sense of time as she feels around her the presence of the Erl-King, a figure of folklore and a harbinger of death. At first this is a being glimpsed only in the corner of her vision but he also comes to visit and ravish her. These meetings exist on the border between horror and the erotic in a way which conveys a sense of masochistic pleasure to accompany her suppressed anger and grief. Since this figure of folklore leaves physical marks on Isabelle’s body it could be interpreted that she’s engaging in a form of self-harm alongside the way she practically starves herself.
I think this a book you need to consider with a lot of patience. It’s definitely not the sort of novel for a reader looking for a story rich in plot as the immediate drama is subsumed by a steady survey of history. But it’s interesting to think how Isabelle’s research acts as a way of considering the way some men from history have been valorised when her own father’s endeavours will most likely be forgotten and she even considers at one point the way he might be damned. This is certainly a melancholy tale, but one with humorous moments such as an exchange with an old grandmother. Adam Scovell’s writing is akin to authors such as W.G. Sebald and Robert Macfarlane whose work mixes the mediums of nonfiction and the novel to form a layered portrait of the world. I enjoyed the deeply meditative experience of this book which poignantly considers how a person at a point of crisis dynamically engages with the past and immerses herself in the flow of time.
