A 'Buddenbrooks' for the 21st century

FictionNo one remembers as relentlessly as family; no one fights as viciously; no feuds simmer as long; no memory is tougher.

Family is the point where love and hate tend to balance on a pinhead. Tribal stories endure; perhaps that is why they have inspired so many novels. Many read as exercises in either self purgation or merely thinly disguised score settling. Others offer an attractive, nostalgic alternative to what really happened. Real life and invention, the elements of fiction, come together to tell a story.

Eva Menasse's outstanding debut, Vienna, may be family history writ large or sheer invention. Whatever it is, this is a remarkable tale, written with flair, ease, black humour and an extraordinary ability to shape a rich narrative that flows like a river through the battlefield of a family's past.

That said, this is a family battlefield rarely encountered in fiction - it is an Austrian variation of Mann's classic Buddenbrooks for the 21st century, direct and to the point. Menasse is an Austrian journalist with a passion for history. There is an ease about her dark realism which is also businesslike, efficient and often very funny. In this her first novel she has achieved the impossible - she has recreated the concept of family. It is a singular narrative, confident and sustained.

Yet again, its presence on the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award longlist, which was announced earlier this week, confirms the valuable service that prize is doing for readers by alerting them to the quality of foreign language fiction such as this inspired debut. For Vienna to survive to the shortlist stage, never mind win, is actually irrelevant. Far more important is that it has been nominated by readers and so will deservedly win more readers. The fact that Anthea Bell, translator of the great W G Sebald, is the translator is also of note. The prose is so perfectly pitched you have to remind yourself it is a translation.

The characters are three dimensional; there are no saints and no sinners, just ordinary people with their respective regrets. Each player lives off the page and without a trace of either sentimentality or caricature, they emerge as real as the person sitting across the table from you.

From the Günter Grass-like opening sentences Menasse presents us with a narrator in possession of most of the facts: "My father's birth was a precipitate delivery. He and a fur coat were sacrificed to my grandmother's passion for bridge."

Considering the wealth of information, the detail, the virtuoso brilliance of the way Menasse skilfully builds up a vast family portrait that shimmers with life, the narrative never flags.

Most of us spend our lives trying to find out who we are. Menasse's clan is largely concerned with one pressing issue - are they Jewish? Sometimes, they think they are. At others, they are not all that sure. It is a question family members ask from time to time. So artful is Menasse, a writer who has perfected a conversational tone which ensures that her narrative never becomes a quest, that she succeeds in giving the impression that here are individuals who from time to time ponder the subject of Jewishness, without ever becoming completely obsessed by it. Late in the novel, the narrator recalls that her brother had explained "we couldn't be Jews because our grandmother had not been Jewish . . . we weren't even half-Jewish, because our father wasn't" but nothing is ever that simple. Nor is this a family given to easy tears. In fact they don't cry all that much.

FITTINGLY, IT ALL begins with grandmother. Once a young beauty who married a good-looking charmer, the narrator's grandfather, she has long since retreated into a caustic serenity sufficiently intimidating to keep the world at a distance. For grandmother, bridge is her comfort and it takes up most of her time and helps her ignore her husband's sexual adventures. Her bridge playing dominated the early childhood of her son, the narrator's father. "My father's first years of life were fairly ordinary. He went to the coffee-house every day, holding his stern and beautiful mother's hand, was made to sit down with my grandmother's bridge partners . . . The extremely un-childlike concentration with which my father followed the fortunes of the cards for hours on end was extraordinary, and would have attracted attention in any other family. In ours, however, anything else would have been considered disastrous."

Then there is Aunt Gustl, widowed early and left with a wayward son, a petty criminal of sorts. Aunt Gustl is about the most proficient schemer in the book and is one of the few characters who plays on her Jewishness only when it seems it may help her.

Menasse's treatment of the second World War and its impact on Austrian Jews, particularly in Viennese circles, is very interesting. History is alluded to throughout; she rarely makes a polemical point.

The narrator is equally discreet. We learn little about her - aside from the fact her brother is a historian, she is middle aged, married and has a son - because she is far too interested in observing her family. Yet a sense of wartime Vienna does emerge beyond the doors of the coffee-house. Chronology for the narrator has been determined by the course of her father's life - this is her structure. As an eight-year-old boy, her father had been sent to England with his brother. On his return to Austria the boys barely know their parents and they have also learnt to speak English so well that, as her father once recalled, he had to learn German all over again.

Father had a talent for football that eventually made him an Austrian hero. His sporting glory helped him in various business ventures, some of which involve his father, a former commercial traveller.

We see the various characters at different stages of their lives. It's the kind of novel in which volumes are contained in the briefest exchange. The characters move in and out of the action as people drift in and out of each other's lives. "'Once upon a time, when Hitler came to Freudenthal,' began my brother in the tones of someone telling a fairy-tale, 'little Hugo from Engelburg jumped straight on his bike and cycled off to see the Fuhrer, pedalling away for all he was worth.'"

In one of the many marvellous set piece moments, the narrator's old father, back in England to visit the graves of his wartime foster parents, is reminded of his footballing skills as recalled in a newspaper report some 65 years earlier. He grins with his usual good humour, before remarking to the narrator, in German, "And now here I am, a cripple."

Vienna is not particularly sad, or even moving. Instead it is profoundly real and unfolds with earthy panache. If the Americans and the Irish appear to consider the dysfunctional family as their exclusive territory, here comes a gifted Austrian with a strong claim of her own.

Eileen Battersby is Literary Correspondent of The Irish Times

Vienna By Eva Menasse Translated by Anthea Bell Weidenfeld. 298 pp. £12.99.