The Secret by Anna Enquist

Fine tuning: The Times (London) on THE SECRET

In the three years since it was first published, Enquist’s novel has won several literary prizes and become a bestseller in the author's native Holland. It is not hard to see why. From its first arresting image of a grand piano “outlined like a burned chop against the snow-covered mountain tops” as it is winched on to the balcony of a first-floor sitting room, to its hauntingly elliptical closing sentence, this is a work without a single false note. Its themes, the transforming power of art, the inescapable nature of the past and the elusiveness of human relationships, alternate and overlap throughout the narrative like notes in a piece of music.

The book’s main character is Wanda Wiericke, eldest child of a Leiden government official and his wife, an opera singer and celebrated concert pianist. Wanda’s childhood is glimpsed in a series of short lyrical passages, whose images—a seaside holiday and a visit to the theatre—evoke a comfortably bourgeois world.

The birth of another child, Frank, on the eve of the German occupation in 1940, introduces a darker mood. Frank is mentally handicapped, and his family are all too aware of the fate that might befall him under Nazi rule. He is kept hidden, his only contact with the world being the sonatas and symphonies played to him by his sister on the family’s piano.

Later episodes deal with Wanda’s marriage to Bouw Kraggenburg, a doctor at the asylum where Frank is sent after the war. The marriage eventually fails, largely because Wanda, afraid that she may be the carrier for her brother’s condition, has decided against having children. A third strand in the plot concerns Bouw’s thoughts about his former wife 30 years on and his impetuous decision to visit her, at her house in the French Pyrenees, in order to bring about a reconciliation. That the outcome of this meeting is left in doubt at the end of the novel is typical of the subtlety with which Enquist writes.

A similar authorial reticence is shown when, as the result of an unguarded remark by her dying mother, Wanda discovers the truth about her past—the “secret” that lies at the heart of her identity. The scene is potentially highly dramatic—a woman finding out that she is not who she thought she was—yet Enquist underplays it, so that its implications are only gradually realised. Her writing is full of such finely judged moments, the slow-burning epiphanies resonating in the mind long after the last page has been finished.

CHRISTINA KONING in THE TIMES, 15 April 2000

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