The Hanky of Pippin's Daughter

by Rosmarie Waldrop, Ben Lerner (Introduction)

Overview

Fiction. Women's Studies. Introduction by Ben Lerner. "Josef and Frederika Seifert made a bad marriage—he so metaphysical, she, furious frustrated singer, furious frustrated femme fatale, unfaithful within two months of the wedding day. The setting is small town Germany between the wars; the Seiferts are just those 'ordinary people' who helped Hitler rise, bequeathing their daughter, who tells their story, a legacy of grief and guilt. Rosmarie Waldrop's haunting novel, superbly intelligent, evocative and strange, reverberates in the memory for a long time, a song for the dead, a judgment."—Angela Carter

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781948980012
Publisher:	New York Review Books
Publication date:	10/01/2019
Pages:	240
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 6.99(h) x 0.72(d)

About the Author

Poet, translator, and editor Rosmarie Waldrop has been a forceful presence in American and international poetry for over forty years. Born in Germany in 1935, Waldrop studied literature and musicology at the University of Würzburg and the University of Freiburg before immigrating to the United States in the late 1950s. She received a PhD from the University of Michigan in 1966. While at the University of Michigan, Waldrop married poet and translator Keith Waldrop. In 1961 the Waldrops began Burning Deck magazine. The magazine evolved into Burning Deck Press, one of the most influential publishers for innovative poetry in the United States. She has lived in Providence, Rhode Island since 1968 and has taught at Wesleyan, Tufts, and Brown. Her most recent book of poetry is The Nick of Time.

Ben Lerner is the author of three books of poetry and three novels, most recently The Topeka School, which was a finalist for the 2020 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction.

Editorial Reviews

08/12/2019

Born to warring parents in 1930s Germany, musician Lucy Seifert tries to piece together her family’s past in Waldrop’s gratifyingly complex novel. Frederika Wolgamot married schoolteacher Josef Seifert in 1926 and began an affair with his friend Franz Huber two months later. The paternity of her twin daughters, Andrea and Doria, born in 1927, is thus in question. And though Franz disappears, there are enough hints of his presence for Frederika and Josef’s younger daughter, Lucy, to wonder years later about the affair and its aftermath. Writing to Andrea from Providence, where she now lives with her husband and is conducting her own affair with a fellow musician, Lucy imagines her angry, unrepentant mother and her resentful, mystical-minded father in a Germany where Hitler is gaining power and the small towns of Bayreuth and Kitzingen, where the Seiferts lived, grow dangerous for Marxists, gays, and Jews—including Franz Huber. Pitiless and determined, Lucy quotes from newspapers and letters and sketches out her parents’ conversations, dreams, and sexual encounters, despite acknowledging the ultimate opacity of what happened: “the past is an imposter. It obeys our expectations.” Waldrop’s text makes an art of this painful inquiry. This novel powerfully models the desire, and the moral responsibility, to know one’s history. (Oct.)

Publishers Weekly

2019-07-15
A reissue of a 1986 novel by Waldrop—an acclaimed experimental poet who was born in Germany in 1935 before immigrating to the U.S. in the '50s—which carefully braids a family's decline with the rise of Nazi Germany.

Lucy, the narrator of this haunting, distinctive novel, is writing to her sister—or perhaps half sister—Andrea with family history much on her mind. Their mother, Frederika, married Josef, a teacher and World War I veteran, in Germany in 1926, but within months she was pursuing an affair with Franz, leaving the identity of the younger girl's father uncertain. Beyond complicating the family tree, the infidelity has messed with everybody's psyches, or at least that's Lucy's assertion. Andrea retreated into a convent; her twin sister, Doria, escaped to start her own family, and Lucy feels she's inherited mom's penchant for affairs. Lucy is trying to pinpoint the root of this dysfunction: The novel's convoluted title refers to a dropped handkerchief that landed in Kitzingen, her family's hometown, a symbol of the impact of a single arbitrary event. The sense of arbitrariness and dysfunction is mirrored in Lucy's recollection of German history. If Frederika had put her foot down more about listening to Wagner, might things have been different? Did the fact that Franz is a Jew further stoke Josef's enchantment with Nazism? "Can I possibly isolate any one particular event as the cause of other particular events?" she writes. "Construct a different family myth out of one little sentence?" Lucy presents a cool intellectual facade, but the novel is littered with spikes that suggest an inner fury—most clearly in the all-caps section headings: "AM I TAKING MOTHER'S SIDE?"; "LATER, YOU GO INTO CONVULSIONS"; "DO YOU NEED ME TO REMIND YOU THAT THE NAZIS GAINED VOTES?" As the political betrayals in Josef's world intensify, she creates a crushing sense of Lucy's feeling burdened by family and country alike.

An unconventional but effective take on the legacy of Nazism.

Kirkus Reviews

yrical first novel continues the experimentalism that has been Waldrop's trademark both as poet and as publisher of Burning Deck Press. Constituting a woman's letters to her sister, it narrates the attempt of both to come to terms with their marriages and affairs between marriages. The cliche ``like mother, like daughter'' applies here, as they justify their actions by exploring their mother's escapades in pre-war Germany. Both mother and correspondent-daughter are musicians, and music provides a poetic metaphor intelligently sustained throughout. The narrative is fragmented, which can make it difficult both to tell a complete story and to create characters with whom readers identify. Waldrop successfully avoids these pitfalls, producing a stunning work. Rochelle Ratner, formerly Poetry Editor, ``Soho Weekly News,'' New York

Library Journal

"Wonderfully, relentlessly absorbing, Hanky’s several overlapping tales leave one marvelling at the beauty, economy and humor with which Waldrop interweaves the complex tensions of Hitler’s Germany in a family drama of repeated infidelity. Delightfully rich and bawdy and as strong-willed as its characters.” — Lydia Davis


“Rosmarie Waldrop’s haunting novel, superbly intelligent, evocative and strange, reverberates in the memory for a long time, a song for the dead, a judgment.” — Angela Carter

From the Publisher