Maria's War

This is a quiet book and requires a quiet mind. It is not a televisual book. It is not driven by plot. Instead there is wisdom and sardonic humour in this detailed study of people making their peace with the past, with who they are, with where they find themselves. It's a book about displacement, understood as the sense that life has brought you to the wrong place, and the way that feeling of displacement needs to be overcome for real relating to be possible. Seen this way, it is not necessary to be a refugee to be displaced. It is necessary only to reject one's experiences, to believe that life has taken a wrong turn. Overcoming this feeling is the central project of all the characters in this book. For Margaret's mother a sense of being displaced from her own life, the feeling that this is not the life she should have had, comes from witnessing a traumatic event as a three year old. Maria is displaced by war, and the disruption to her marriage that it brings. Erica is displaced by old age to a retirement home, and by a sense of loss at never having had children. For Maria and Erica, accepting where they are, in Leicester Gardens, means accepting their fellow residents, accepting a strict, largely arbitrary set of conventions, and finding ways to live within them, much as a displaced person in a camp, or indeed any person not living and working alone. Learning these conventions requires a kind of hyper-vigilance which Witting conveys through detailed descriptions of the tightly choreographed movements of the retirement village's residents: who is getting the coffee for whom, who sits where. The conventions can be maddening, like the restriction on Erica's desire to walk alone in the bush, but they can also be reassuring, liberating one from too much human closeness when one would rather be alone. How much to reach out to others, how much to divulge, is one of the central questions the characters face. For Witting, too much silence is never a g


Genre: General Fiction