Peter Steiner. The Clearing. Hanlin. Riverside: Ariadne Press, 2007. 166 pp. $18.00 (paper), ISBN 978-1-57241-151-7.

Reviewed by Ulrike Nichols (Independent Scholar)
Published on H-German (July, 2008)

The Significance of the Insignificant

Peter Steiner's second novel, The Clearing (1995), engages with the historical past in the format of the family novel, dealing with a family's history and the history of the twentieth century from the perspective of the grandson. The novel describes how the narrator, who plans to visit his father's grave, spends an afternoon walking around the house of his long dead grandparents. While strolling around the garden and peeking through the windows, he remembers not only his childhood spent there, but also the larger past of his family. This novel describes a homecoming that brings closure to the narrator, allowing him to leave the place in the end in order to continue his life elsewhere in the world. To introduce the novel, Todd C. Hanlin, the book's translator, uses a quote from Adalbert Stifter in which Stifter explains how a "gentle breeze, rippling water, growing grass, waves upon the ocean [and] the greening of the earth" are much more significant to him than earthquakes that ultimately change the landscape (p. 161). The comparison is well employed, as nothing significant is described in Steiner's novel and yet, the life of the whole family rests in the geographical and social locale of The Clearing.

The main dichotomy that comes to expression in this text is that between the clearing and the world outside. The clearing represents shelter, which nonetheless can be harmfully disturbed by external forces. As a boy, the narrator was protected there but even then, he could feel the outside world: his father joined the army joyfully and both his father and grandfather welcomed the German annexation of Austria. Russian soldiers found the inn at the clearing, assaulted his grandparents, and stole everything. One night, his father returned as a shadow in the dark outside the gate to the garden. Yet, not everything from the outside world evokes sad or bad memories. As a gardener, the grandfather created new plants whose roots he had secretly taken from the subterranean lake where he had learned his profession. Because of these biological experiments, the clearing also signifies a space that illustrates the harmonic coexistence of non-native and native specimens. However, due to his memories of other interventions from the outside world, the narrator decides that "nothing [is] further from my mind than betraying to science the Clearing and everything around it" (p. 76). The peace does not have to be disturbed. If the clearing were forgotten, it would seem to suit the narrator quite well, as nature will be the only acting force at this spot. For the narrator, this insignificant location had been a perfect place to train for his globetrotting life; he became a geologist and explored the fauna and flora all over the world.

The book is written as a diary, starting out as a letter to a friend of the narrator. Yet, this silent addressee only serves as the trigger for the narrator's journey into his family's past. Soon the text abandons direct address and, in a stream-of-consciousness style, wanders through the life of the narrator's grandparents, parents, and a great-uncle who had moved to the United States and started a new life there. Years later, the narrator followed his uncle's path, trying to understand the life that the silent uncle had never revealed to his family.

The clearing provided the narrator with roots that gave him strength in his endeavors in the outside world. The symbol for these roots is the spring to which the narrator went as a boy and from which he carried water in heavy buckets back up to the house. The spring is hidden behind the moss and only the locals know it. It resembles the source of life as it literally connects all of the family members: "It is the water of our deceased that we been drinking throughout our lives. Even you have drunk it, even you" because the water was transformed into the holy water in the chapel at the clearing with which all infants were baptized (p. 72). The narrator follows the path of the water and, carrying it, he found a rhythm that enabled him to observe the plants and stones around him. The same thoroughness characterizes his search for his genealogical roots. He is the only family member to ask his grandmother about what happened when the Russians came upon the clearing and why nobody from the village came to help after the invaders shot at the grandfather. This "episode" is woven into the narrative, just like the difficult family life after the war and the conversation between the narrator and his brother during which the narrator learns of his father's death. As the translator cites in the afterword, fellow writer Peter Handke was deeply moved by Steiner's ability to capture what "kills us Austrian writers, or children or sons as well: that we can't love our fathers" (p. 164). Indeed, Steiner manages to sketch out in a few paragraphs how the father came home from the war in the middle of the night but remained outside the gate, unable or afraid to return home. He continued to be a stranger to his family, whose dysfunction was further increased by the mother's decision to move away, accepting a job in Austria's west: "In truth, we not only lost the war, we also lost the peace" (p. 91). Steiner's craft in choosing his words concisely and the detail with which he depicts the landscape inextricably linked to this family history create the remarkable beauty of the book as well as lending it a narrative complexity that make it quite challenging to read.

The novel contributes to the recent discussion in Austrian literature on Austria's lack of resistance to the German annexation and the role of individual Austrians during the war. Steiner's work explores the significant elements of life in a seemingly insignificant clearing. The reader learns of the narrator's deep respect for the hard life of his grandparents. He owes his love for nature to them and the understanding that (outside) nature can result in beautiful flowers as well as destruction. Thus, the book also indirectly links the historic discussion to current environmental and political issues and moves beyond the genre family history that has become so popular during the last decade.

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Citation: Ulrike Nichols. Review of Steiner, Peter, The Clearing. H-German, H-Net Reviews. July, 2008.
URL: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=14762

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