At the onset of World War One, Joseph is conscripted to fight, leaving Maria and her marital fidelity, unprotected. As Josef heads out, he makes a request of the mayor of the village, a man he trusts above all others, to watch over his wife. This is a questionable arrangement from the start, aside from its obvious patriarchal mindset, and it becomes shakier as time goes on.
The prose is lean, and the story has the simple feel of a tale told to a child—and eventually, the reader discovers that this is because Monika Helfer, the author of this novel, Last House Before the Mountain, is recounting the stories of her family’s past in an attempt to make sense of her own identity. The details of multiple generations of her family are distributed carefully, laid out as pieces of a puzzle. As the author reveals:
Maria was the name of my beautiful grandmother, the woman whom all the men would have run after if they hadn’t been afraid of her husband.
The novel’s slow recounting of events that happened to Maria, does not so much paint a vivid picture as provide a series of stick figures in sketches. These figures become more fleshed out and colorful as the novel progresses. Josef leaves for the battlefield, departing to a vague location that is never specified, referred to only “the mountains to the north of Italy,” and when he returns for brief visits, the details of army life and the larger war itself remain a distant reality that is never discussed. The war is not Helfer’s concern—instead, it is an abstract event that happens in an unseen place. She, like the villagers, does not venture far beyond the shadow of the mountain.
Predictably, the mayor interprets the “protective” service he has been tasked with broadly in his mind. While he provides Maria and the children with much-needed supplies like food (a side of bacon, potatoes, apples, etc.) and necessities like soap—which the family, having lost Josef, their means of support, can ill afford—the mayor decides he is owed something in return. On visits to the Bagage house (yes, that’s their name!), he makes brazen advances on Maria, touching and caressing her under her blouse. At first, she attempts to tolerate it, but eventually nine-year-old Lorenz, the oldest of the children, comes to her defense, brandishing a shotgun at the mayor.
A further complication develops with a German visitor named Georg, who Maria meets at the weekly market. Red-headed Georg shows up to the house uninvited and Maria is aroused in his presence, discovering new sensations that she has never experienced with her husband. She believes she has fallen in love.
This scene is reminiscent of The Bridges of Madison County, the 1995 romantic drama starring Meryl Streep, who never looked more fetching than in a flowered apron and house dress. In Last House Before the Mountain, it’s the Austrian Alps and wartime, and the whole affair, if one can call it that, is over almost before it starts. “Almost” being the key word, as Maria becomes pregnant with her fifth child. Is this a result of the visit with the enchanting—and now vanished—stranger, or of one of the brief furlough visits with her husband?
One thing is certain—the village has more to talk about.
Maria’s pregnancy becomes the hot topic du jour, provoking a visit from the town priest, who is on a mission to further shame Maria. The priest self-righteously demands that Maria “confess” and proceeds to remove a cross from the family barn, a symbolic act of humiliation. This act only increases the family’s alienation from the rest of the village, although they, the family, continue to show up at church, in their isolated spot in the last pew.
When the war ends and Josef returns to the village, he meets the new addition to the family, a girl named Margarethe. Josef refuses to acknowledge the child, and he never touches her or says her name. As we learn, Margarethe—or Grethe—is the author’s mother.
While she is not bitter about her circumstances, Maria is portrayed as a woman who might imagine a life different from her own, knowing she will never be that other person. Helfer, as the narrator, conjures a picture of Maria’s impossible dreams of herself as a finely dressed woman at the opera:
Dreamt herself away from everything, away from her family, her children. She would not have felt guilty about it, that’s how I see her, that’s how I imagine it. As if her family never existed. As if she had been born in Vienna and Berlin, in cities where someone like her would be noticed. Her brother-in-law had books with pictures of Vienna and Berlin that she liked looking at. She daydreamed about being at the opera, looking down from a box into the audience, and noting how people were whispering about her. She was the beauty being talked about. It was a place for fine ladies to see and be seen and she was one of them. She wore an ice-blue dress, an ice-blue matching the crusty snow that twinkles when the sun hits it, and she had eyes as bright as the heroines in novels.
While this particular family’s history is neither heroic nor especially shocking—an indiscretion that leads to an unplanned pregnancy is hardly an unheard-of event—the reader feels empathy for this woman out of sync with her time, the Cinderella who never makes it to the ball—or the bright lights of Vienna. The very believable quality of this story of one infidelity’s repercussions that continue for at least two generations makes the novel compelling and relatable. All families are shaped by messy entanglements of one sort or another, loves that lasted or didn’t, hardships and disappointments, and husbands and brothers (or wives and sisters) who were sent off to wars in faraway places; and both those who leave and those who are left cover up deeds they’d rather not share. A photo album of secrets and lies.
Last House Before the Mountain is crisply economical in its style, but there are times one craves more descriptions. Let’s hear more details of life in those towering Austrian Alps. How did they get news of the outside? Where exactly was Josef sent in 1914?
That’s not Helfer’s preoccupation, of course. She is focussed on the psychology of her characters and even drops this tantalizing insight, although (disappointingly) without much further explanation:
When I visited the Art History Museum in Vienna for the first time and saw the paintings of farmers, by Pieter Brueghel the Elder, I thought to myself they look just like my people, the people from the stories of my mother and my Aunt Kathe . . . I am at a loss to know what to say about many of the stories of my people. Because they are about madness.
Helfer intersperses her prose with two abrupt generational leaps in the narrative, from Maria to Monika. This is disorienting at times, but the breaks do offer the reader a breather from the intensity of the central drama. The story is told in a non-linear backwards and forwards manner until all is revealed. There is also a feminist bent to the story—the woman with unrealized dreams, the breathtaking beauty with an erotic power that she only vaguely understands, and the underlying premise that the only female role available to her is to be the caretaker of Kirche und Kinder—and to be acted UPON instead of having control of her own desires.
As a young girl, Maria is called “lively”—with the implication that this hazardous trait may get her into trouble, opening a Pandora’s box of female potential. The description of her as “lively” operates as a quaint euphemism for a girl whose unbridled spirit and sexual appetites spill out of her personality in ways that impede her proscribed role in society. As a child, the author herself was warned, “Watch out you don’t get like your grandmother!” Here, she elaborates:
Lively, one hundred years ago was a reproach. “Don’t be so lively!” that’s what they said. “I’m afraid she’s a bit lively” was said as an apology. I can imagine a mother and mother-in-law talking to each other, “I’m afraid my daughter is a bit lively” says the mother to the mother-in law about her daughter.
We aren’t told an exact location, but this mountain village is likely not geographically far from glittering Vienna, the capital of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. It seems light years away in cultural awareness, however. Vienna was called the city of music, but it was also known as the city of dreams—and appropriately, the controversial study of psychoanalysis was then creating a stir in sophisticated coffeehouses and salons.
It’s a remarkable juxtaposition of time period and location. After all, it is in Vienna that the resident archeologist of the mind, Freud, was digging into the psyche of female patients to understand female hysteria, a word whose derivation is from the Greek word for uterus. That term, thankfully, is no longer used in the profession, but at the time, there was great fascination among the Viennese intelligentsia in investigating sexual behavior, and in separating the mind from biological forces. It is unlikely this interest spread much beyond the city limits, but ideas do have a way of spreading, even across mountains.
Moreover, as World War One was causing disruption in rural areas with the conscription of men like Josef and the consequences for their families, there were startling changes in society. Styles of clothes were changing; skirts were shorter and clothes were less constraining as gender roles were gradually loosening too. The War changed political boundaries as well—after 1918, the Austro-Hungarian Empire ceased to exist as a political entity, Austria became the Erste Österreichische Republik, or First Austrian Republic.
This is the first book by Helfer to be translated into English after she became a best-selling author with Vati (Library for the War-Wounded; Der Hörverlag, 2021). That novel similarly traces the threads of family history, centered around her own childhood and her father, who became an amputee in World War Two. That book has also been newly released in an English translation, and along with Last House Before the Mountain, the author aims to produce a third book, forming a trilogy with these transgenerational stories.
One wonders, finally, what Helfer thinks of the story of high-spirited Maria, the grandmother who pursued a moment of passion, the results of which led to the author’s own birth, as she presents the chronology of events without much reflection. Near the end of Last House Before the Mountain, Helfer reaches the same conclusion that most of her readers probably do, after digging through too many dusty family archives only to find more layers of dust—and unanswered questions—inside:
To bring order to memory—would that not be lying? Lying in the sense that I would be implying that some kind of order exists.
If she finds some order at last, it may be revealed in the final book of the trilogy.
