Joachim Frank's novel "Ierapetra or His Sister's Keeper" reviewed by Eugene Garber

 In "Ierapetra, or His Sister’s Keeper", Joachim Frank’s splendid new novel, we find ourselves in the company of Reiner and his sister Monika. Reiner has two passions, science and writing. Monika has family and quilting. We accompany them on holiday to the Island of Crete. We are immediately immersed in an archetype, innocents abroad in a challengingly unfamiliar culture, in this case two youths from the stern clime of northern Germany transported to the sunny sensuality of the Mediterranean. The powerful narrative that pulls the reader relentlessly through the novel from beginning to end is familiar. What effect will culture shock have on our siblings while they are in Greece, and will it persist when they return home? Will their old commitments survive?

 If on the sequestered island sun-burnished flesh is seductive, then there may be seductions. If a certain moral laxity colors the ambience of the island (a condition against which strictest barriers have been raised back home in Germany), then there may be tests of moral character. And so there are, both. Reiner, a straight arrow, may, under the tutelage of the delightfully bawdy Rosa, a sort of benign Carmen, learn to curve. Monika, an ingénue, may discover a genuine femininity in the arms of the bumptious but seductive Bernhard, a wannabe architect mucking about in Greece. Each in a characteristically different way will have to deal with deviance from the traditional values. Their trials are tense and moving.

 So, character and plot give the novel a powerful base, but there are other uniquely valuable treasures. One is richly layered symbolism. The scene is Ierapetra, which means sacred stone. Stones are strewn over the beaches of Ierapetra. They assume a darkly numinous quality in the mind of Reiner, glowing like lanterns, filling him with dread. Reiner remembers himself and his sister Monika as children pretending that the quartz stones they found in their yard in Germany were gold. Later at Monika’s burial site Reiner reflects on the obdurate refusal of headstones to express the richness of human complexity. Nor do these instances exhaust the meanings Frank has attached to stones.

 One can enter the novel by way of its title, "Ierapetra, or His Sister’s Keeper" and its dedication “In Memoriam Renate 1944 – 1998.” Was Reiner a dedicated keeper of Monika? Was Joachim Frank of Renate? This double signification of brother and sister brings us to Frank’s ingenious layering of presumed reality and fictive invention. Early in the novel the author decides that telling the story in the first person will not work. He must distance himself from memories likely to prove unmanageable. Thus is born his avatar Reiner and the invented sister Monika. The artistic result is a kind of elegant scrim that most often foregrounds Reiner and Monica, but sometimes becomes almost transparent and reveals Joachim and Renate behind. The effect, powerful but difficult to describe, is an alternation of tones—elegiac, remorseful, foreboding, comical, contemplative—as the dominance of foreground or background at any moment engenders. 

Is there a central theme that binds together the various riches of the novel? Early in the novel Frank, not yet creator of Reiner, is reminded of a flea circus he once watched in Copenhagen. What fascinates him is the fitful starts and stops of the fleas as they execute their acrobatics, “the counteracting forces that caused them to restart capriciously and at random. Until then, I think I had conceived the world as a giant Cartesian machine, where random lapses were inconceivable. At that moment, I realized these suspensions of the rule of determinism were in fact commonplace.” This is very close to the center of the novel. Are our lives just a random one thing after another? Or does what happens to us inevitably cause what we are? Or Heraclitus’ “character is destiny?” Or . . . what? We are confronted with a great mystery about life. And as long as it remains a mystery there will be a place for magical fictions like Ierapetra.