On the other side of the barbed wire, SS officer Karl Müller arrives at the camp hoping to live up to his father’s expectations of wartime glory. But faced with a brutal routine of overseeing executions and punishments, he longs for an escape. When he encounters the newly arrived Marijke, this meeting changes their lives forever.
Woven into the narrative across space and time is Luciano Wagner’s ordeal in 1977 Buenos Aires, during the heat of the Argentine Dirty War. In his struggle to endure military captivity, he searches for ways to resist from a prison cell he may never leave.
From the Netherlands to Germany to Argentina, The Dutch Wife braids together the stories of three individuals who share a dark secret and are entangled in two of the most oppressive reigns of terror in modern history. This is a novel about the blurred lines between love and lust, abuse and resistance, and right and wrong, as well as the capacity for ordinary people to persevere and do the unthinkable in extraordinary circumstances.
Expected publication: September 4th 2018 by Park Row
Genre: Historical Fiction
Kristine's Thoughts:
** I received an advanced readers copy from the publisher via NetGalley in exchange for an honest review. Thank you!**
The Dutch Wife took place during WWII and during the Argentine Dirty War in 1977. It told the story of three unique and completely different people.
First there was Marijke de Graaf, a member of the Dutch resistance, who was captured and imprisoned at Ravensbruck Concentration camp. A group of handpicked women that included Marijke were asked to volunteer to be transferred to Buchenwald where they would have better food and accommodations. The only catch was that they would have to be a part of the new brothel program that the Nazis were introducing to reward prisoners for good behaviour. Fearing for her life and hoping that she would be able to find her husband, she stepped forward and volunteered.
SS officer Karl Muller was new to the world of camp life. After moving up the ranks quickly in an effort to please and follow in his father's footsteps, he found himself with a high ranking position of running the camp. It did not come easy to him and he struggled to be the man that he needed to be in the eyes of the SS. Marijke caught his eye one day and he soon found himself visiting the prisoners brothel on a regular basis, an added complication to his day to day affairs.
Luciano Wagner's ordeal occurred in 1977 during the Argentine Dirty War. He found himself captured, tortured and imprisoned for being a member of a resistance movement. His struggle for survival and to continue to fight for what he believed in was detailed within the pages.
First of all, let me start out by saying that Luciano's story did not fit with the rest of the story and felt strangely out of place. Yes, there is a connection through a character but it didn't fit with the feel of the rest of the book. Every time the story would rotate to his, it felt like a speed bump slowing the rest of it down. Don't get me wrong, his story was interesting but it felt like a different book that was accidentally placed within the pages of The Dutch Wife. I feel like it would have been better served in a separate book, telling the whole story on its own. In turn, The Dutch Wife would have been better without his story.
It was Marjike and Karl's stories that I enjoyed mostly in this book. Having read hundreds of books about WWII, I have to say that The Dutch Wife was not as detailed as many. It almost felt like more of a condensed version of events and time as I read it. It was very simply written and seemed to skim through events. For this I feel like it would be a great introduction for someone who is new and unfamiliar with this genre and topic. Although a dark subject and time it wasn't as gruesome and detailed as other books on this topic are. It's not to say that it was rainbows and unicorns because it was definitely not.
I thoroughly enjoyed reading about Marijke's time in the prison brothel. Although this story was fictional, concentration camp brothels were not. I just recently visited a WWII concentration camp in Germany (not Buchenwald) and learnt quite a bit about prison brothels and the thought behind them. With that fresh in my head it was certainly interesting to read a story about it.
The biggest surprise for me was how I felt about Karl and his story. He was not a good man. He did atrocious things. Let me get that straight. However, he did have a conscience and struggled with some of his duties. In the end though, he saw his duties through. At times he showed moments of kindness and love even if they were naive and self serving. In his eyes, he was taking care of Marjike the best way he knew how even though he didn't see it through to the end. It showed that people are products of their environment and how society and duty can rule the way we think and act. In a different time and place, he may have been a kind and decent person.
All in all, I enjoyed this book and I feel like other people will too.
About the Author
Winner of the HarperCollins/UBC Prize for Best New Fiction, Ellen
Keith is a Canadian writer and a recent graduate of the University of
British Columbia’s MFA program in creative writing. Her work has
appeared in publications such as the New Quarterly and the Globe and
Mail. She currently lives in Amsterdam.
Connect with Ellen
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