The Things We Cannot Say (2019)
Kelly Rimmer
416 pages
An historical event of the scope and magnitude of the Second World War offers a rich palette for novelists. With large parts of the world having been deeply impacted, the story possibilities seem nearly endless; and, able to count on readers having some level of understanding of the broad outlines of what happened, writers can develop their plotlines without having to explain in detail the larger context.
Kelly Rimmer takes full advantage of these opportunities in her moving novel of a family discovering the truth about its past, The Things We Cannot Say. The story follows two protagonists: Alice, who lives with her husband and two children in present-day central Florida; and Alina, a girl in
her mid-teens living in the small southern Polish town of Trzebinia with her parents and brothers as WW II looms on the horizon. Alice and Alina serve as our narrators, with Rimmer alternating the chapter titles as simply their names.
After a prologue that hints at a hopeful outcome for the story to come, we are introduced first to Alice, on her way with her son to the hospital to visit her grandmother who has had a stroke. Next we meet Alina, in 1938, as she and her boyfriend Tomasz face his impending departure to Warsaw to begin his studies to become a doctor. From this beginning, Rimmer then, bit by bit, closes the 70-some year gap between the timelines, and so reveals the connection between the two women.
Alice arrives at the hospital to find her grandmother, who she refers to as Babcia, unable to speak but seemingly clear-headed – and intent on asking something of her. Eventually she understands that Babcia wants her to go to Poland; but she is confused to realize that Babcia apparently wants her to go there to find Tomasz, which is the name of her recently deceased husband, Alice’s grandfather. Her ability to communicate limited, Babcia only becomes more and more frustrated when Alice tries gently to reminder her that Tomasz has died.
Confusion over who exactly her grandmother is looking for is not Alice’s only hesitation about agreeing to go. Complicating matters for her is that her family situation makes leaving for even just a week-long trip difficult. Alice and her husband have two children: a ten year old daughter who is an academic over-achiever and knows it, and a seven year old son, Eddie, who is on the autism spectrum, and requires an iPad app to communicate. We learn that Alice’s husband has largely left raising Eddie to Alice, and that she, in turn, has become convinced that Eddie cannot survive without her constant attention.
But Alice cannot refuse her beloved grandmother, and thus two interleaved plotlines are set in motion for Alice – her trip to Poland to try and satisfy her grandmother’s mysterious request, and the evolving dynamics of her strained relationship with her husband as the trip requires her to let go of her tight control over her son’s life.
For Alina, half a century earlier, the difficult separation from her boyfriend soon becomes overshadowed by the traumatic invasion and occupation of Poland by Nazi forces in 1939. Even as she and her family continue to farm their land – and to maintain a low profile to try and avoid the swift and brutal violence of the occupiers – she longs to know that Tomasz is safe, and desperately awaits his return.
Within the traumatic fight for survival that Alina experiences as the occupation drags on Rimmer slowly reveals the mysteries that Alice, through her exchanges with her grandmother and especially her trip to Poland, must resolve some 70 years later. Rimmer’s approach of alternating the story between the two women, revealing hints at the truth through Alina’s story even as we watch Alice try to uncover how what she already knows – or at least thinks she knows – relates to what she learns upon her visit to Poland, creates a dramatic tension that propels a reader forward to the dramatic revelations to come.
A love conquers all theme runs through the stories of both women, though in each case in complicated ways. For Alina, the deep love she has for her family, and that she shares with Tomasz, becomes tested by the inexorable constraints of war and occupation. The situations she faces and choices she must make come fraught with stark implications for her future and that of those she loves most.
Alice, as the primary care-giver for Eddie, has carried the weight of learning how to structure his world to accommodate his autism. In the process, however, she has inadvertently reinforced her husband’s distant relationship with Eddie, to the point that caring for Eddie has completely enveloped and consumed her life. Her solo trip to Poland, along with forcing her husband to re-engage with Eddie, tests her ability to cede control over her son’s every moment. In addition, it provides an opportunity to reset the entire dynamic of the family that she loves dearly, but that has become increasingly dysfunctional, leaving her frazzled and overwhelmed.
While the subplot of Eddie’s autism and its impact on the family supports the larger evolution of the story in several ways, it also provides a powerful look at the challenges of raising an autistic child. I can’t evaluate how well Rimmer has done that, not having first-hand experience, but it certainly feels real. More generally, there is a small but powerful moment of childhood that Rimmer captures perfectly, and that perhaps any parent can identify with in some way:
[Eddie] won’t watch [Thomas the Tank Engine videos] in public anymore and lately at school he’s been reacting violently if the teacher tries to put one on for him. She thinks he’s socially aware enough to understand that he’s probably a bit old to watch them, but he doesn’t have the language to talk to us about that, so he only wants to watch them in private. That nearly breaks my heart. (114)
As profoundly moving as Rimmer captures Eddie and his relationships with his parents and grandmother, one aspect of the novel that rang a bit false was how Rimmer drew up the other characters. For all the complexity of the plotlines, the characters were more simply drawn as basically good people with particular flaws that they eventually come to recognize and grow out of by the end of the story. (Except for the Nazi’s, of course, all presented as indistinguishably pure evil.) And the characters starting points tend to be simple stereotypes: a mother who handles all the housework and child-rearing; a husband with a well-paying job but clueless around the house; a savant daughter who can’t hide her imperious impatience with how much smarter she is then everyone else; and even the teenage Alina, loving daughter, sister, and fiancé, and yet struggling to contain her teenage impulsiveness. Certainly one could argue that all these stereotypes have a basis in reality. But it gives the characters a bit of a cardboard feel, with little complexity or depth, as if constructed solely to support the plot rather than being independent actors caught up in the story. It ultimately makes it hard to really care for them.
But that aside, in The Things We Cannot Say, Rimmer has written a dramatic story of a family history turned up-side down in the chaos of the Second World War. And, with so many English language novels set during the war having plotlines built around events in western Europe or on the American experience, I found Rimmer’s story to be an engaging window into at least a small piece of the Polish war-time experience. The half of the story set during the war benefits from the natural drama of precarious survival that ruled so many lives in those years. And once Alice lands in Poland in an attempt to divine her grandmother’s mysterious request, the novel becomes truly hard to put down.
Other notes and information:
I had an odd experience on the day I received the book. I was given it as a birthday present, and read the back cover description of the story when I unwrapped it, which introduced the character Alina. I recall thinking that it was a name that I hadn’t seen before, or at least hadn’t noticed seeing before. Then, a few hours later, I was at the gas station, and when I went to get the receipt, because it didn’t print at the pump, the attendant behind the window turned around and I saw the name “Alina” stitched into her uniform…
Have you read this book, others by this author, or even similar ones by other authors? I’d enjoy hearing your thoughts.
Other of my book reviews: FICTION Bookshelf and NON-FICTION Bookshelf
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