All the Beautiful Liars- The Fictional Memoirs of Katrina Klain by Sylvia Petter- 2020

 

All the Beautiful Liars- The Fictional Memoirs of Katrina Klain by Sylvia Petter- 2020

Website of Sylvia Petter

My post on “Grow Up” - A Short Story by Sylvia Petter - 2017 - included in her collection Back Burning  

A very detailed insightful review from the Yorkshire Times 

All the Beautiful Liars is a simply marvelous account of a woman’s attempt to discover her real past.  Her German father and Austrian mother immigrated to Australia right after the end of World War Two, she was just a young girl. Her school mates made fun of her, calling her a “Nazi” even though she did not know what that actually meant, just that it was something very bad.

As soon as she could Katrina moved to Vienna.  We meet her on a long flight back to Sydney for the funeral of her mother. In Austria she has already met one of her uncles who embezzled a fortune from the Austrian government.  She knows her family, including her parents, were involved with the Nazis and later the German Secret Police.  But there are darker secrets waiting for her, secrets that will undermine her sense of her identity.

Katina’s discovery take us deeply into areas she wished she had left alone.  Her family history illuminates the impact of the war on survivors, people who did what they thought they must.  The novel is structured in a very creative fashion.  We have Katrina’s thoughts on the long flight intertwined with that of an all knowing alter-ego trying to force her to see the truth. Maybe this is a paranormal entity, maybe something from her drifting into sleep on the very long flight.

Most of the narration is by Katrina but there are segments from her father, her mother and an uncle.  No one can quite be believed.  Her father had Nazi sympathies she never knew about.

The ending is very powerful .

“I am  an Australian, now based in Vienna, Austria.  I’m all over the place, a blob of mercury on a lab   floor, as my old writing boot camp sergeant, Alex Keegan, used to say. Born in Vienna, I grew up in Australia and after more than 25 years in the Geneva area, am now living in Vienna, Austria. I started writing fiction in 1993, and my poems, articles and stories have appeared in print and on the web.

I’ve attended workshops and writing conferences in Austria, Australia, Canada, France, Ireland, Spain, Switzerland, the UK and the US, and have done   correspondence courses through Humber College, Toronto. In 2009 I completed a PhD in Creative Writing at UNSW and am working on my second novel.

I was Co-Director Vienna of the 13th International Conference on the Short Story in English, Vienna, 2014.  A founding member of the Geneva Writers’ Group, I   am currently a member of IG Autorinnen Autoren and GAV, Vienna, Austria, and the Australian Society of Authors.”

From https://www.sylviapetter.com/about-me/

I found this a deeply moving work 

very skillfully and beautifully told.

Mel u

The Reading Life 

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“Grow Up” - A Short Story by Sylvia Petter - 2017 - included in her collection Back Burning from 2007

 “Grow Up” - A Short Story by Sylvia Petter - 2017 - included in her collection Back Burning  

You may read today’s story here

Website of The Aussie Reads 2020 Challenge

Website of Sylvia Petter 

“  I’m a grandmother now. Would you believe I’ve fallen in love? I ride rainbows with leprechauns, wear purple underwear. Somehow nobody seems to bother anymore. It suits me like that. I blow bubbles and raspberries wherever I choose and my world is full of indigo and cyclamen. My grandchildren understand me”.

I know from long years of experience and from reading posts by many others that lots of those deeply into the reading life first entered it as young children because the world of “grown ups” did not have that much appeal.   We mostly got on with our lives, worked, had long and short relationships, had children but still did not feel like real grown ups.  And why should we, their world sucks!

“Grow Up” by Sylvia Petter wonderfully takes us in a perfectly crafted short story into the life of a woman who always resisted when her parents, her husband and others told her to “grow up”.

We meet the narrator in elementary school where she first encounters Peter Pan.  She learns he could not only fly he never grew up.  At once she seizes on both ideas.  The story of Peter Pan becomes almost a mantra for her life.  Her mother often chides her “Grow Up”.  When she gets her first period and develops breasts she does not like either change She hears a neighbor tell her mother “my how Pamela is growing up”.

Pamela marries, has a child but still does not desire to be a real grown up.

Her husband tells her, “time for you to grow up”.  They part ways.

I loved the ending.

In this story we see how an encounter with a fictional person can shape your life more than real people.

“I am  an Australian, now based in Vienna, Austria.  I’m all over the place, a blob of mercury on a lab   floor, as my old writing boot camp sergeant, Alex Keegan, used to say. Born in Vienna, I grew up in Australia and after more than 25 years in the Geneva area, am now living in Vienna, Austria. I started writing fiction in 1993, and my poems, articles and stories have appeared in print and on the web.

I’ve attended workshops and writing conferences in Austria, Australia, Canada, France, Ireland, Spain, Switzerland, the UK and the US, and have done   correspondence courses through Humber College, Toronto. In 2009 I completed a PhD in Creative Writing at UNSW and am working on my second novel.

I was Co-Director Vienna of the 13th International Conference on the Short Story in English, Vienna, 2014.  A founding member of the Geneva Writers’ Group, I   am currently a member of IG Autorinnen Autoren and GAV, Vienna, Austria, and the Australian Society of Authors.”

From https://www.sylviapetter.com/about-me/

I will post on her forthcoming novel All the Beautiful Liars.

From the publisher

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‘A stylistically daring, hurricane-paced and genuinely impressive feat of the imagination’ – Billy O’Callaghan

As a child in Australia in the Fifties, Katrina Klain is taunted in the playground as a Nazi, long before she knows what the word means. Her German mother and her Austrian father seem to be ordinary people who simply ended up on the wrong side of history, but Katrina yearns to know more about her origins.

Leaving the New World behind as soon as she can, she heads to Vienna, where she imagines her Germanic name will no longer be a burden, armed with what turns out to be an inexhaustible list of questions. Is the sleazy uncle exiled to Spain a crook or a hero of the anti-Nazi resistance? Why does her father insist his brother is dead? And is her cousin in East Germany really a Stasi agent?

Decades later, during a long flight back to Australia, Katrina attempts to reassemble the pieces of the puzzle she has spent so long researching. In her dream-like version of an in-flight movie, a mysterious other-worldly guide seems to know – and have control over – her own future.

Told in a thrillingly inventive narrative style, Sylvia Petter’s debut novel is a powerful, pacy tale about making peace with the past, which also paints a richly evocative picture of Central Europe in the early decades after the war.

OUT JANUARY 2021. AVAILABLE FOR PRE-ORDER NOW

http://eye-books.com/books/all-the-beautiful-liars

Mel u