MURDER FARM, THE

Ausgezeichnete Geschichte. Elegant geschrieben. Anatomie eines kleinen, isolierten Bauerndorf nach dem 2ten Weltkrieg, von den Einwohnern erzählt, mit echten Stimmen.

This short novel is ideally suited to being read in one sitting.It stays in the mind long after completion.Set in rural 1950's Germany, the narrator returns to an isolated community where a whole family and their maid have been slayed.Nobody in the community knows who is responsible, they have turned a blind eye just as doubtless they were used to doing living under the Nazis.The investigation takes the form of terse testaments from the villagers,and these are interspersed in the book with Christian devotions,which adds to the mood of inner bleakness.The reader can come to their own conclusion regarding the murderer on the basis of the testaments. The Murder Farm is an immensely creative and unusual novel, that deserves a wide readership.

Overall a pretty pointless, though not terrible read. The landscape imagery is very nice, the characters are somewhat interesting, but the story is told mostly via police interview transcript, which makes for a mostly flat, somewhat cliche, and far too underdeveloped story.

After being thoroughly impressed with The Dark Meadow by Andrea Maria Schenkel last year I decided to treat myself to another of her slim novels. The Murder Farm is a recreation of a real crime in which the Gruber household were murdered in 1922. Having researched the details of this unsolved crime following my reading of the book it is clear that the author hasn’t strayed far from the known facts about the murders although she has chosen to set it in a slightly later time period.In 1950’s Germany The Murder Farm was home to the Danner family which consisted of the stern patriarch and farmer and his equally stand-offish wife. Their daughter Barbara Spengler was also slain along with her daughter Marianne and her baby son, Josef. It wasn’t only the family who lost their lives that night, the brand new maid Maria was also killed. Scarily the alarm wasn’t raised until the inhabitants of the village realised they hadn’t been seen since the previous Saturday and so a couple of their neighbours went to investigate, the scene that awaited them defied belief. Despite being viewed as remote and odd, there was no obvious reason why someone would choose to slay the entire household, or was there?Our nameless narrator returns to the village near the Black Mountains to try and discover what really happened.The story is told in a similar format to that of The Dark Meadow, with excerpts from the villager’s recall of the events, so we get to hear from one of Marianne’s school friends, a former employer of the maid, her sister, Marianne’s school teacher, a mechanic, the shopkeeper, the local farmers and the priest slowly building a picture of the characters within the household along with some of the local gossip that they ‘reluctantly’ revealed. What is really appealing about this device is that each person recalling the day has a clear personality and I could only wonder at how the author pulled this off in so few words, a lesson indeed to some authors who seem to think that more words makes for a better read!In addition to the recall of their neighbours we also get to hear from some of the victims too. So gradual is the way the details are revealed both in the background and the discovery of the murder scene, that it is not until the very end that it becomes clear who committed the awful crime and why.This is a very impressive read although because I’d read The Dark Meadow the format wasn’t as fresh this time, it did work well in this context. The translator should Anthea Bell deserves a special mention for her work as this is an immensely readable book and apart from the names I soon forgot that the original was in German. I will be looking out for more books by this author.

It is a mystery story, told in a new format. The characters are described. The statements of possible witnesses are taken.The reader is the detective.Drawback : requires careful reading and a good memoryI do not have these qualities, but still enjoyed the storyI never recommend. I will say : I liked it