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  • Guilty (Country) SecretsMaria Beig’s Hermine: An Animal Life
  • Matthew Neill Null (bio)

Maria Beig, still living at ninety-six, is the startling chronicler of life in Swabia, a rural, Catholic region of southern Germany, a place of farms and rolling hills, of country fatalism and sublimated dreams. Her books capture the precariousness of women’s lives in that place. She maps their astonishing emotional territory but never resorts to sentimentality, detailing their interactions with priests and philanderers, scolding relatives and suspicious friends, stationed soldiers and half-hearted suitors. Without the labor of the National Book Award–winning novelist Jaimy Gordon and the German academic Peter Blickle, Beig’s work would be inaccessible to American readers.

Twenty years after its German debut, Hermine: An Animal Life was published in 2004 by New Issues Poetry & Prose, in Gordon’s English translation. Here, Gordon and Blickle (Gordon’s husband and an authority on Beig) have selected six brief chapters to represent the novel, which recounts the life of Hermine, the misfit of a large farming family—perpetually underfoot, clumsy, on the edge of things, a problem to be solved or skirted. I don’t want to give much away, but I should say that Hermine is a bestiary of sixty-four animals; each chapter is characterized by her interaction with a different animal in that landscape, as she grows from infancy to childhood to married life as a school teacher. It is rare to encounter such a work of contemporary fiction that gives animal life its due. [End Page 150]

I continue to be struck by Maria Beig’s bracing candor, her unwillingness to soften the essential brutality of life among people. I hope these chapters give a taste of this. Readers, if moved, should also seek out her amazing novel Lost Weddings, about four unmarried women who navigate a conservative culture where family, tradition, and mores are sacrosanct—all of which they are destined to disappoint, merely by continuing to exist.

Last August, Gordon and I began our conversation about this Reclamation piece on a dying cellphone—I called her from Sistersville, West Virginia, one of Gordon’s favorite towns, where I was hiding out from a wandering cloud that could have killed me and my child. My own town had been evacuated when a rail-car carrying thirty thousand gallons of liquid chlorine cracked open and the chlorine turned to toxic gas. So I drove down the Ohio River to wait, listen to the police scanner, and see where the blue cloud moved. (Shades of Don DeLillo, another favorite of Gordon’s.)

I reached Gordon at her home in Kalamazoo, Michigan, where she was watching a horse race—anyone who’s read her work will know her abiding love for horses and track life. Hearing about the chlorine spill stunned her, as it wasn’t really picked up by national news. She was sure she wanted to include the “Mosquitoes” chapter from Hermine, as she had improved her translation since 2004, with new knowledge of the soldier’s nursery rhyme. She and Blickle would choose the rest together.

The next day, I drove around to see where the chlorine left brown trees and dead gardens behind. That stretch of West Virginia was a fitting place to discuss Beig—a still-rural landscape with tentative patches of industrialization. Axiall, the chlorine plant, known in my youth as PPG, stands on the Ohio River between Sistersville and Moundsville—the latter the setting for Indian Mound Downs, the fictional racetrack featured in Gordon’s fabulous novel Lord of Misrule. Free trade and outsourcing have fallen like a hatchet on this place; the people continue to live in the wound. My great-grandfather represented the above-mentioned towns in the state senate, and nearly all of my high school classmates had parents who worked at the chlorine plant, a strike-hardened factory of union workers who had good homes and pensions and sent their children to college—a disappearing American life. Yet once you leave the river valley, you’re in ridges among second-and third-growth forests, country graveyards, trailer homes, modest churches, and farms dotted with Charolais cattle. If I squint...

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