‘The Scrapbook' considers the weight of history on a modern love

Washington Post

22-06-2025

How does history constrain our personal choices? Can we and should we try to break free?
Heather Clark, author of the splendid Sylvia Plath biography 'Red Comet' (2020), poses these questions in her immersive first novel, 'The Scrapbook.' One inspiration, she reveals in an author's note, was her grandfather's World War II scrapbook, with its gruesome photographs of the Dachau concentration camp after liberation. But the novel's core narrative involves a passionate and seemingly doomed collegiate love affair five decades later.
The protagonist, Anna, is relating the main story, set in the late 1990s, in retrospect. She seems at times completely in the (remembered) moment; at other points, she is clearly looking back, or flashing forward to the romance's unraveling. Her journal of the period, she says, has been lost. Clark omits quotation marks around dialogue, speeding the narrative flow.
Anna, a gifted Harvard senior on the verge of graduation, falls for Christoph, a thrillingly handsome and seductive German student who is visiting from abroad. They meet at a party and, immediately smitten, she spends the week before finals engaged in deep conversations with him. (The sex comes later.) Despite the unwieldiness of their long-distance romance, the cultural gulf between them, Christoph's intermittent aloofness and warnings from her friends, Anna stays smitten, building her postgraduate life around him — or trying to.
'He was everything to me then,' she recalls, in an obvious intimation of disaster. Later she'll admit that her vision of the relationship 'had the hazy, shimmering quality of a mirage.'
The book's simple-enough plot is fleshed out with literary references (Plath's poem 'Daddy' merits a callout, as do Rainer Maria Rilke, Heinrich Heine, Tadeusz Borowski and, more obliquely, W.H. Auden). Clark invests even more in her characters' conversations about the politics and landscape of Holocaust memory. The bibliography appended to the novel shows how deeply she has steeped herself in the subject.
The dialectic between remembering and forgetting turns out to be a complicated one, as each German generation struggles anew with the country's criminal past. Christoph views popular allegiance to Hitler as a case of mass hypnosis. Anna acquits him, reasonably enough, of any complicity. 'He wasn't a Nazi,' she tells herself. 'He was a twenty-three-year-old German man wrestling with questions of evil and guilt and responsibility, questions that would probably haunt him all his life.'
The central narrative is interrupted by the wartime adventures of Anna's soldier grandfather, whose photographs fill the scrapbook of the title, and both of Christoph's grandfathers, who participated, in different ways, in the German war effort.
There are surprises here, but also literary conundrums: Who is relating these stories, and why? How reliable is the third-person narrator of the historical sections? And what light do these vignettes shed on Anna and Christoph's entanglement?
These interpolations seem to have their rationale in the novel's thematic concerns. Clark is interrogating whether past misdeeds implicate future generations — and whether they should. In an epigraph, she quotes the German writer W.G. Sebald, who notes that when he saw images of war, 'horrors I did not experience cast a shadow over me, and one from which I shall never entirely emerge.'
To appreciate 'The Scrapbook,' it helps to remember the pull of youthful, hormone-fueled love based on magnetic, perhaps ineffable attraction. The ineffability is, of course, a challenge for the novelist. 'I closed my eyes and my body became the sea,' Clark writes, in one attempt to capture Anna's sexual acquiescence.
Only the force of her infatuation can compel Anna (if not the reader) to disregard the many indications that Christoph isn't quite who she imagines — or wants — him to be. To begin with, Anna's Harvard roommates, both Jewish, dislike Christoph, mainly because he is German — a reaction at once harshly intolerant and understandable.
More worrying is Christoph's own behavior. When Anna visits him in Germany, he wanders off at parties and ignores her. He belongs to a fencing fraternity whose hazing rituals seem ominous or, at best, ill-conceived. He breaks a promise to visit the United States again. And even though she ditched her studying for his company when they first met, Christoph seems to put his own studies first. When she telephones him during a long, transatlantic separation, he is often mysteriously absent — and unwilling even to call her back.
As Clark depicts him, Christoph, however self-centered, also displays considerable sophistication and historical savvy. Banal treachery seems beneath him. That makes his behavior in the book's climactic scene seem surprising, even preposterous, despite Clark's careful foreshadowing.
There are nevertheless hints that the story of the two lovers may not be over. An open-ended epilogue offers a glimmer of hope that love may yet overcome history.
Julia M. Klein is the contributing book critic at the Forward, and she reviews for the Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, Boston Globe and other publications.
By Heather Clark
Pantheon. 244 pp. $28