On its surface, The Scrapbook is a story about first love. In the 1990s, a young American woman, Anna, and a German man, Christoph, meet at Harvard when — as Anna later repeats like a mantra — she should be studying. Christoph’s classic charms prove too magnetic, and Anna spends the next year consumed with him, mostly from afar, since he returns to Germany soon after they meet. A broke recent grad, Anna can only swing transatlantic visits sparingly, and Christoph, for murkier reasons, stays put.
Heather Clark is an accomplished writer of literary history, and the simplicity of the premise of her debut novel proves deceptive. Through Anna and Christoph, only fifty years removed from World War II, readers are quickly lulled past the story of girl-meets-boy into a reckoning with history’s reverberating horrors. Anna and Christoph’s grandfathers fought on opposing sides of the war. Hers was an American soldier, keeper of the eponymous scrapbook passed down after his death, while Christoph’s grandfathers fought for Germany. Once again, the details on his side are unclear; once again, it may be easier not to know them.
Neither character bears their legacy lightly. For Christoph, living in postwar Germany beneath the stultifying weight of the nation’s actions, Anna provides an outlet where he can finally discuss the war. “You can’t leave your house here without finding something that shocks you,” Christoph says of Germany, insisting that he will “never get used to it.” For Anna, Christoph presents an opening to experience the trauma she has only read about as an American raised on postwar narratives from the distant shores of New England.
Sentence by sentence, Clark builds Anna and Cristoph’s dynamic — sexy, slightly masochistic, and always propulsive. Her reserved, elegant prose nails the rending, intoxicating nausea of first love without being cloying. To fall in love is to shift from youthful naïveté toward adulthood’s cloudier complications. Clark treats this rite as a cerebral experience as much as it is physical. The Scrapbook crackles with the intensity of meeting one’s intellectual match — the debates, the discovery, and, of course, the books. Anna and Christoph’s exchanges are a trove of references, from war history to Sylvia Plath. Anna should’ve been studying, yes — but studying takes various forms. And it is a lifelong affair.
Megan Peck Shub is an Emmy-winning producer at Last Week Tonight, the HBO political satire series. Previously she produced Finding Your Roots on PBS. Her work has been published in New York Magazine, The Missouri Review, Salamander, and Vol. 1 Brooklyn, among other publications.
