Critique: Caging Skies (Christine Leunons)

This story relates Jo, a young Austrian growing up during World War Two. We see how badly-adjusted youths can become whilst growing up during war. The characters in this book wind me up so much. It’s in a realistic way but it does mean I have to brace myself whilst reading this story.

 

The paragraphs tend to be long yet they are the perfect size. For an author to manage this is no mean feat.

 

*****SPOILERS*****

 

Being a translated text certainly doesn’t help but that’s what editors are for: to fix bad writing.

For example, one sentence was fourteen lines long. That’s simply too much. Also, they wrote ‘we were making it grew intolerable’. No, what’s intolerable here is the bad grammar. The ‘grew’ should be ‘grow’.

In it, the referendum on Austria being annexed by Germany being annexed. But how can it be annexed if it’s agreed? I’ll put this down to a problem in translation because I don’t know if this was the intended meaning.

The book says that lefties have to pull the pen across the page and righties have to push. But it’s the opposite way around when using Latin script (which Austrian does). Even if this is a translation error, it’s a massive oversight.

 

 

Badly-adjusted Jo

 

The war screwed Jo up. It screwed up his interactions and perceptions.

The children in Austria were indoctrinated. Young children are impressionable so this is hardly difficult. As schools got to them first, their parents’ views were side-lined. Indeed, ‘my father… wasn’t at all grateful for my willingness to teach him important facts.’ Then he complained that his mother was the gullible one, not realising what she was ‘was just propaganda’. People never consider themselves as afflicted by propaganda, do they? Just others.

Jo is possessive Elsa, thinking he owns her and getting jealous over Nathan and the cat, the other beings to which Elsa shows attachment. Jo is petty, punishing her for these affections. He feeds her so much because ‘her loss of beauty gave me self-confidence’. ‘I was trapped in my lie as much as she was.’ Elsa says love is free and liberating, not possessive. Jo enraged when Elsa lied. Hypocrite. Elsa says need a few lies to live how she does, otherwise would fly away. Then says ‘keep the truth to yourself if you care to keep me’. Elsa eventually leaves once she finds out the truth. Jo equated winning or losing the war with winning or losing Elsa. So Jo first lies about the war being over and then that Germany won.

It’s scary to think how one man’s wants lead to so much death, destruction and mental/emotional scaring.

 

 

Good Parts

 

There were many good examples of writing that deserve praise.

The opening paragraph of this novel is the best opening paragraph I’ve ever read. It was beautiful in description and deep in thought.

Jo thinks of Elsa so hard that ‘[i]t was a wonder no one could see her sitting on my lap.’

I loved the description of Elsa’s eyebrows being so uneven that they make each eye look as if they feel different things.

Buds on trees open like child’s hand waking up.

‘Why is Austria so strong? Because it makes the world believe Beethoven was Austrian and Hitler German.’

Jo describes starving people as ‘[s]keletons wearing nothing but loose skin’ which is such a vivid image.

My favourite line was, ‘If God provides her with so much light, I didn’t see why she needed me to pay high electric bills.’ Just to think, there’s an energy crisis whilst I’m writing this! That makes this line relatable rather than simply funny.

Jo and his dad had a fantastic theological debate. God only exists as part of man, Jo argues. God doesn’t exist, unlike a painting that people can touch. So his father replies that you can’t touch love but love still exists. This is a shortened version but it makes a complex theological debate accessible to the everyday reader.

 

 

Nonsense

 

Some things were written that utterly stumped me. Not because they were confusing but because they simply made no sense. Arbitrary nonsense, the lot of it.

Once his mother dies, Jo has to do all the cooking, shopping and cleaning. But Jo’s been stuck at home for years. What on Earth has he been doing with all that time?

Jo asks whose fault it is that Elsa is isolated from the real world, ‘hers or mine?’ Um, yours.

Jo puts a decomposing bird in Elsa’s bird cage. He fetched it from the ruins of Frau Veidler’s home. Yet her birds died years ago so they should have fully decomposed by now.

Jo describes Elsa’s face, now with a double chin, as ‘whorish’. I’ve never heard anyone equate obesity with prostitution before. Is that an Austrian thing or a Jo thing?

Then there’s this. ‘I think the genuineness of my love, however, can be seen through the empty white bars between the lines like a sad primate at the zoo.’ The comparison of between the lines being like between the bars is clever. But seeing the love between the lines? I don’t. What Jo has to Elsa is obsession, not love, and even that’s not between the lines.

 

All-in-all this was a worthwhile read. The progression of propaganda, and the escalation of lies, were handled with extreme talent. But the problems with the translations followed by these arbitrary, nonsense statements easily throw the reader off. I’ve read this book twice and that was too many times.