Our Narrow Hiding Places: A Novel
“a half-dozen chapters are narrated by the eels. Their perspective is fascinating and brilliantly imagined.”
“Hunger every minute . . . It is like there is a living thing inside her, pulling on one organ, pushing on another,” recalls Mieke Geborn of the last months of World War II in the Netherlands, known as the Hunger Winter, when she was eight years old. “Her muscles sting in all the places they attach to her bones, as if they might just snap loose. . . . When she lies down, the pain is there between the discs in her spine.”
Our Narrow Hiding Places is unsparing in descriptions like this, rendering starvation and brutal survival all too vivid and real.
Less realistically, the novel begins with talking eels and moves on to Dutch fairy tales, inexplicable dreamlike visions, and a magical chest from Japan whose carved wooden figures “were moving about, dancing, impossibly, their bodies shifting in a silent dance around the court floor.”
So is this a historical novel? Magical realism? Author Kristopher Jansma adroitly ties together the novel’s three main plot lines, spanning nearly the entire eight decades of Mieke’s life—plus, perhaps, a few thousand years in the eels’ history. The combination produces an unusual book that is compelling and beautifully written, albeit confusing at times.
The Hunger Winter storyline relates how Mieke, her family, her future husband Rob Geborn, and his family survive the five-year Nazi occupation of the Netherlands. Among other tactics, Mieke in desperation catches a pair of eels, which the two mothers cook. Rob’s father apparently does not survive, however, despite climbing into that Japanese chest and mysteriously disappearing.
Alternating chapters take place during a current-day winter, when Mieke, now 80 years old and long widowed, is living alone in a small New Jersey shore town. As this section begins, Mieke has fallen and twisted her ankle, a major snowstorm is barreling in, and her adult grandson, Will, has come supposedly to help her out.
But Will may actually need more help than his oma (grandmother) does. His marriage and his job as a partner in a two-doctor medical practice are both in jeopardy. His wife heads off to Osaka for a 10-week teaching fellowship, leaving it unclear whether she’ll return, and Will breaks his wrist after punching a doorframe in a fury.
Mieke’s neighbor, meanwhile, has conveniently come into possession of an obscure book, written in Dutch, that seems to explain the circumstances of Rob’s family’s odd original name, Naaktgeboren, which translates to “born naked.” Separately, Will is beginning to uncover long-hidden secrets about his father, grandfather, grandmother, and great-grandfather.
In short, there are a few too many plot threads to follow. To make matters more confusing, the point of view in the present-day chapters switches frequently between Mieke and Will, sometimes in mid-paragraph.
Also, a half-dozen chapters are narrated by the eels. Their perspective is fascinating and brilliantly imagined.
If the story gets lost now and then, each narrative is intriguing, and the characters are all fully realized human beings. Ultimately, Jansma—an award-winning fiction writer as well as director of the creative writing program at the State University of New York at New Paltz—has a thoughtful message about history.
As Will recalls a long-ago visit with Mieke to the sand dunes and abandoned German fortifications of her Dutch hometown, he ponders, “What must have it been like for his oma to see her grandson on top of those old fortifications, leaping around innocently . . . dancing on the graves of her worst fears and traumas. This was the world of gray areas, he remembered, where joy was possible, too.”