Unspeakable Things

November 9, 2015
Magical realism brings hope to Holocaust survivors in poet Spivack’s overly ambitious, occasionally lyrical novel. During World War II, in New York City, former Viennese official Herbert Hofrat unofficially works in the New York Public Library and at an Automat, doing favors for fellow refugees. Herbert’s youngest son, Michael, last seen on a boxcar headed for extermination, haunts his mother, Adeline, bereft in a psychiatric hospital, and brother, David, a decoder for the Americans. David has just discovered that someone in the refugee community is secretly collaborating with the Nazis when a newcomer arrives: Anna, aka the Rat, Herbert’s Hungarian cousin, a dwarf with a humpback and a beautiful face. Herbert and Anna share a fondness for Esperanto and chess, dating back to before Herbert married Adeline and Anna a dissipated Russian count. Also in New York are the Tolstoi String Quartet: the toast of prewar Vienna until their wives, tired of playing second fiddle, left them
to Hitler’s henchmen, who cut off the musicians’ pinkies. Coincidentally, the severed digits have also come to New York, into the laboratory of Dr. Felix, a pediatrician during the day, but by night a mad scientist dedicated to cloning a master race. Spivack is at her best describing musical magic. Depicting
villains, she exceeds poetic license, losing the credibility that makes magical realism real. Over-the-top images involving Rasputin, a one-legged prostitute, and preserved body parts are meant to capture the allure of ugliness and evil, but instead they suggest the author would have been better served leaving unspeakable things unspoken.

September 15, 2015
In poet/memoirist Spivack's first novel (With Robert Lowell and His Circle, 2012, etc.), magic realism is used to explore the plight of post-World War II Jewish refugees in Manhattan. At the New York Public Library, Herbert, a former Austrian official, finds a small bundle that contains the tiny, deformed body of his second cousin Anna. Called Rat for the white whiskers that frame her mouth, she has been mysteriously delivered from Leningrad. Rat is not the only person seeking Herbert's help in the New World. The Tolstoi Quartet wants him to recover the four pinky fingers they had to surrender in order to leave Vienna with their lives. Somehow they know the pinkies are "waiting to be rejoined with their owners," an only slightly implausible leap of faith for men who once shared beds with their animate instruments while their wives slept on the floor. Readers already know the fingers are in the possession of Dr. Felix, a Nazi posing as a pediatrician to New York's refugee community. Even more bizarre than the idea that anyone would let Felix near their children, given the creepy way he behaves before ushering out the parents and molesting the kids, is the collection of body parts dispatched to him by the Nazis that he keeps in jars against the day when he can make them "live again." Obviously none of this is meant to be realistic, and some point about survival and renewal seems to be intended. But it's lost in a text that has some truly vulgar scenes-Anna's pre-Revolution interlude with Rasputin is soft-core pornographic-and an overall maddening vagueness. Images of Herbert's son Michael appear over and over to make the point that his loss has fractured the family, but it's never explained why delivering him to the death-camp boxcars would enable his equally Jewish father, mother, and brother to go free. A final scene of renewal in suburban America is, regrettably, unearned. Well written but ill-conceived.

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Starred review from October 15, 2015
Kathleen Spivack, whose father, famed management guru Peter Drucker, left Austria, his homeland, in the mid-1930s to begin his professional life in the U.S., portrays Jewish refugees from Nazi Austria in her hallucinatory first novel, Unspeakable Things. Herbert, a man of secrets and influence, tries to help others in his predicament, including the courageous, bizarrely afflicted Tolstoi String Quartet, even as his own family suffers. Spivack's illumination of her characters' loss and fears, set against blaring, brash New York in grating contrast to shadowed, tyrannized Europe, are gorgeous and despairing in their precision, yet this is not a work of straightforward historical fiction. Instead, it is a macabre fairy tale of monstrous fascinations, horrific exploitations, and desperate strategies of survival. Spivack's villain is an evil doctor intent on master-race genetic engineering, while the most seductive figure in her menagerie of the damaged is Herbert'sbeloved cousin, brilliant, tiny Anna, who is called the Rat for the punishing deformity that bends her into an animal crouch. Strangely alluring and utterly bewitching, she tells Herbert's young granddaughter about the unspeakable things she endured in Russia, especially at the hands of the notorious mystical faith healer, Rasputin. Amid gothic eroticism and chamber-of-horrors surrealism, Spivack considers the epic betrayal of the European dream that art, culture, and rationality can triumph over hate, malevolence, and terror. Alas, the tragic war between these opposing states of mind continues to rage.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2015, American Library Association.)

October 15, 2015

In the waning days of World War II, Herbert Hofrat is at the center of an underground movement to assist refugees of the Holocaust. His son David searches for secret codes in the War Office, while his wife, Adeline, a concert pianist, is in a rest home suffering from dementia. Herbert's childhood friend and first love, Anna, a physically deformed Russian countess, arrives unexpectedly and moves into the Hofrats' cramped living quarters, which also house David's wife, Ilse, and their two young children. Meanwhile, the family doctor harbors several dark secrets. Rounding out the cast of characters is a Viennese string quartet whose members paid a horrible price for their escape from the Nazis. VERDICT This is not for readers hungering for a slice of history grounded in detail and realism. Instead, poet Spivack has created a bizarre and disturbing dreamscape that includes the ghost of Herbert and Adeline's lost son, twisted and violent sex, and horrific experiments in genetic engineering. Spivack, also the author of the memoir With Robert Lowell and His Circle, has crafted rhapsodic prose that sometimes borders on the melodramatic, though in many places it resonates with beauty and power. [See Prepub Alert, 7/6/15.]--Christine DeZelar-Tiedman, Univ. of Minnesota Libs., Minneapolis

Copyright 2015 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

August 1, 2015

The daughter of management genius Peter Drucker, who fled Europe for America in the 1930s, published poet Spivack studied with Robert Lowell and befriended Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton, as celebrated in 2012's With Robert Lowell and His Circle. Her first novel is set in early 1940s New York and features a range of characters who come undone as Europe burns in the background.

Copyright 2015 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.