The blindness of the heart, by Julia Franck

So many Grimm fairy tales are just that, grim. The opening of this award-winning novel, translated from the German, is so reminiscent of one of those tales -- a confused young child is abandoned by a distant and seemingly uncaring parent -- not in the woods this time, but in a busy railroad station in post-WWII Germany where those trapped in the East are struggling to move to the West. But the real beginning is at the end of the first World War, when the mother's father returns home to die. Helene and her older sister Martha escape to Weimar Berlin from the small village of their birth, leaving behind their increasingly disturbed and disturbing Jewish mother. There Martha slips into a debauched and drug-addicted world while Helene studies to become a nurse like her sister had been. She meets Carl, a philosophy student, with whom she falls in love, but circumstances are against them and she ultimately ends up married to a self-centered civil engineer. By the end of the novel, one understands the act that began the book, but it doesn't make one feel any better, frankly. With some college background in German literature and this period in particular, I had hoped to like, and to understand, this book better than I did. 424 pp.