The Women in the Castle by Jessica Shattuck

The Women in the Castle by Jessica Shattuck was our May book club book.  I liked it a fair amount.  

It was the sort of book that led to intense book club discussion.  In the novel, three mothers must deal with the outcomes of World War II on their lives in Germany.  One was a resistor, one was married to a resistor, and the other had a past that was murky.  Each character had her flaws and quirks and the back stories led to a heated debate.  If everyone is making choices that are good for themselves and their own families, but all those individual choices lead to the murder of millions of people, was there a way to prevent those atrocities?  

The parallels with what's going on in the US today were almost too in our faces.  Should we all quit our jobs and refuse to go in if our employers don't offer us PPE and sanitary conditions?  I mean, our own survival is at question, but if enough people did it, we could make change happen, right?  Should we gather tens of thousands of angry armed people and storm the detention centers where children who aren't citizens are being housed right now?  Individually, we could die or be jailed, but would it effectively cause something better to happen?  Or should we just keep on doing what's the best thing for ourselves and our families?  Is this country going to just fall into patterns of pre-war Germany until suddenly it IS concentration camps, snitching on neighbors, and Hitler Youth groups?  

So, that's that. It was a breezy read, but it was also a read full of moral dilemmas and impossible choices.  Here are some of the lines I noted.  

1. He was the sort of man who contemplated grand abstractions like the Inalienable Rights of Man or the Problems of Democracy while shaving. It rendered him oblivious to everyday things. (page 3)

I laughed at this because I am married to a political theorist and the number of times my husband has come out of the bathroom spouting off about some connection he made between Rawls and Arendt is not small.  And I love my husband dearly, but he sometimes forgets basic life things like that we need to buy kitty litter and pay the water bill. Those are my jobs, though, because my thoughts are small and not deep.  

2. Germany was being run by a loudmouthed rabble-rouser, bent on baiting other nations to war and making life miserable for countless innocent citizens. And here they were, drinking champagne and dancing to Scott Joplin. (page 10)

Is there a more perfect parallel for what's going on in the United States today? I think not.

3. The religious pleas of her youth had returned to her in prison and served as an anchor in the endless sea of silence. Without them, she was sure her mind would have drifted away. She did not believe in them, but still, they had saved her – not God, just the words. (page 26)

I am a hard-core anti-theist.  I just don't think about religious. But I am a product of a Christian nation (heavy sigh) and when I'm super stressed I will suddenly forget lyrics to songs like "Livin' on a Prayer" by Bon Jovi and "Let That Pony Run" by Pam Tillis, which are songs that I know front to back, and all of a sudden I'll be humming the chorus of "Jesus Loves Me."  I don't even know how I know that song. 

Anyway, we do fall back on words when we need comfort, don't we?

4. They said this was what happened sometimes: as soon as one made it to safety, illness set in. (page 60)

I get sick every academic year around Thanksgiving.  I just get home  on Wednesday night and *bam* I'm down for the count.

5. Instead, they followed their mother like silent, restive Dobermans. (page 117)

I do a lot of work on book club books, taking notes, doing research, writing down my favorite lines. What I'm really known for is notating all the metaphors involving animals.

6. History was horrible, a long, sloppy tail of grief. It swished destructively behind the present, toppling everyone’s own personal understanding of the past. (page 205)

What a great metaphor.  Someday people are going to look back at May 2020 and the grief will be palpable.

7. She felt the pulse of the lives lived inside the mean little houses as she passed: selfish or generous, kind or unkind, ugly or tolerable, almost all of them sad. (page 218)

Do you ever wander into a neighborhood and just wonder why it feels so oppressive?  It's crazy. You can be in a perfectly middle-class neighborhood and it will just feel like there's a weight on your chest until you leave.  Sadness seems to cluster and there's no visible way to identify it, but your body knows.

8. Or maybe it is her experience as a Nazi that made her suspicious of metaphor, euphemism, and figures of speech. (page 332)

The obfuscation of language in these modern United States made this line ring a little too close to home.  

9. As a gardener, she knows that if you turn over a rock, you will find worms and potato bugs. Sometimes even a snake. And as a German, she knows that if you start poking through a shoebox of photographs, you’ll find Nazi uniforms and swastikas and children with their arms raise in Heil Hitler salutes. (page 348)

This is it. It's your family, but there's a history there that isn't always something to be proud of. What do you do? How do you acknowledge the mistakes in your family's past without turning away from those family members who have done horrifying things?  It's hard to grapple with.  

10. …dogs are a superior species. (page 350)

The character was talking about how she had dogs instead of children. I found this line to be somewhat hilarious and almost exactly my thoughts on life.