ETERNAL SUMMER, by Franziska Gänsler; translated by Imogen Taylor
When Ivan Turgenev left Paris for Baden-Baden, the German spa town famed for its casinos, vineyards and salubrious air, he urged his friend Gustave Flaubert to come visit. “There are trees there such as I’ve seen nowhere else,” he wrote in an 1863 letter. “The atmosphere is young and vigorous. … When you sit at the foot of one of these giants, it seems as if you take in some of its sap — and it’s good and beneficial.”
The atmosphere in Bad Heim, Baden’s fictional counterpart in “Eternal Summer,” is anything but. The slim, stunning first novel by the German author Franziska Gänsler is set in an unspecified year when climate collapse has left this formerly lush, healing region so ravaged by wildfires it is virtually uninhabitable. The town’s last remaining hotel — the “gloomy,” outdated five-room Hotel Bad Heim — is the unlikely setting of an even unlikelier bond between two lonely women, each bearing the load of her own quiet desperation.
Iris Lehmann is the hotel’s owner and sole employee, having inherited it from her grandfather after her mother died of an illness at 32. She hasn’t had a guest in weeks, thanks to an abnormally hot October that has left the coniferous forest across the river as dry as a field of matches and rekindled the fires. She is without family or friends, save for an aging, alcoholic neighbor named Baby, whose physical might, inappropriate laughter and habit of keeping “a whistle handy to blow down the phone if she didn’t like the sound of the caller” provide this razor-sharp novel with moments of soft padding.
There is a deliberateness, even a negligence, to Iris’s isolation: “Although I could see the fire through the window, the situation in the forest eluded me,” she narrates. “My dealings with the fire were limited to wiping up the fly ash, keeping my little world in order.” Despite the dangerous air quality, she sunbathes alone in her grandfather’s Japanese garden while police helicopters circle overhead, blaring: “Stay home, wear face masks, keep doors and windows shut.”
Into this ghostly scene walks Dorota Ansel, elegant but haggard, holding the hand of Ilya, a girl no older than 4. Neither is wearing a mask, and their shoes are covered in ash. “They’d brought the smell of the forest in with them,” Iris observes from the lobby, Imogen Taylor’s translation elegant and eerily restrained: “the smell of burned leaves and smoke.”
The woman and child will bring much more into Iris’s cloistered life over the ensuing days, as their awkward proximity, the unintended intimacy of strangers stranded together as the world burns, yields to a needful closeness — a fragile chosen family.
This makes their courtship sound sweeter than it is. Day after day Iris encounters another troubling data point in the mystery of her new guests. Dorota refuses her offers to clean their room, and a “sour, stale smell” wafts from their cracked door. Iris finds Ilya alone in the forest at the crack of dawn, inhaling the hazardous air, looking for her mother. Driving back from town she sees Dorota pushing Ilya in a stroller on the highway far from the hotel, her high heels clacking hastily among the roadside’s “dry trees, rough bushes, garbage.” When Iris offers her a ride, the woman pretends not to hear: “She hurried on, hands gripping the stroller, eyes fixed ahead.” A man starts calling the hotel early in the mornings, looking for a woman and child who fit the guests’ descriptions.
Gänsler builds tension, both personal and existential, with astonishing control, and care. As Dorota and Iris inch closer, so too does the fire, as well as the private threat Dorota has fled. A plan to throw this man off their scent gives way to a white-knuckle car ride in 109-degree heat that ends at the emergency room.
The reader senses that the nascent romance between Iris and Dorota is doomed, not least because the narrator repeatedly compares her guest to the other, most important woman in her life whom she has lost: her mother. “It was like hearing my mother talk in Dori’s voice, overwhelmed by everything,” Iris thinks as Dorota panics during the car ride. “I couldn’t expect her to make decisions.” And yet, like the child’s groundless faith in the omnipotent parent, Iris’s “fantasy” of starting over with Dorota and Ilya in a different bed-and-breakfast overlooking a lake feels as real as breath on skin.
“He’d never find us there,” Dorota whispers as they daydream about this unreachable idyll, impervious to both men and environmental catastrophe alike. But Iris is not a child; she knows that the rains will come, the fires will subside — and they will also come back. Anticipating being alone in her “little world” once more, she tries to convince herself that “nothing would change for me; all I’d lose was a castle in the air.”
ETERNAL SUMMER | By Franziska Gänsler | Translated by Imogen Taylor | Other Press | 162 pp. | Paperback, $16.99