Three decades in a little town in North Dakota.
Fidelis Waldfogel, master butcher, survivor of Germany’s WWI defeat, marries
his dead best friend’s girl, cooks up a suitcase’s worth of sausages and emigrates
to North Dakota. He establishes a meat
shop, raises four sons with his wife Eva, all the while maintaining an uneasy
relationship with town native, half-wild Delphine, who works in the shop and is
Eva’s best friend. Meanwhile, the many
town eccentrics, including Delphine’s alcoholic father Roy, interact, creating
a tapestry of inventive almost folkloric tales. The town
members persevere through the tough times of the Depression and then World War
II.
What a storyteller. The novel was almost 400 pages but didn’t
feel long at all. I was completely entranced, eager to find out what happened
next. (Even though what happened next
was, for the most part, pretty quotidian, just like real life.) The novel was chockablock full of crazily
detailed anecdotes. The new young
immigrant holding extended for hours his suitcase of sausages to raise money
for a train ticket further west, Delphine balancing a guy and six chairs on her
stomach, a little boy trapped beneath a mountain of dirt, the town hobo
suddenly finding the funds to open up a bric-a-brac shop. The stories kept coming, yet they only helped
fuel the momentum of the novel. Also,
they were funny in a deadpan way.
There are also some beautifully written scenes, scenes purely
celebrating the joy of life. I loved the
bit with Eva and Delphine drinking beer and pouring some out for the slugs in
the garden. Finally, the story barely
touches on the singing club and I think that title was nothing more than a good
joke.
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