Reviewed by Ian Lipke
This is the story of Adelheid Brunner, an intelligent girl who chooses not to speak. On these grounds she is ignored by most scholars as of minimal capacity. Adelheid knows much of what is happening about her, her knowledge substantially aided by her habit of hiding in cupboards with her pet rat Franz Joseph, where she listens to conversations that are just beyond her comprehension.
The story is unusual in that the first chapter is written as a report subsequent to the chief character’s death. Readers are asked to rely on the absolute accuracy of the memory of Adelheid Brunner, the chief character, who “recorded every detail in a most meticulous manner” (1) in notebooks that have been destroyed. Adelheid is a strange girl who sees recorded history only as a conglomeration of facts since she doubts the existence of either past or future. She sees endless present moments appearing like matchboxes laid out in a collection.
Early mention is made of Dr A who befriends Adelheid and does much to glue the characters and events of the story together. Dr A is quite clearly Dr Asperger, after whom Asperger’s Syndrome is named. Recognition of this breakthrough in medical science is paid in the story via the prominence given to A’s thesis.
Comments that are almost off-hand feed into the story. Adelheid’s grandmother is “sharp and bristly as a small, neat hedgehog. She carries a suitcase and says – Come Along. Hurry Up. Stand Still”, locked away into statements that are habitual but logically meaningless. They are likely to be tucked alongside comments that are clever and apt. [Rumour and Gossip scurry up the pipes and across the elaborately plastered ceiling as quick as Franz Joseph might run if he were not in my pocket].
Jolly keeps the tension at a high level by telling a tale that grows out of events central to the story, that is, integral to the whole work, as well as those environmentally bound by events and time. This is the decade of the 1930s, the years that saw the rise of Hitler with the awful spread of Nazism in Europe. Not only will people working within the hospital confines cultivate suspicion of one another and their motives and political leanings but also maintain suspicion of similar people within the wider community.
Jolly creates a community that is not only richly diverse, but which also operates with a consistency that is a model of the novelist’s art. We witness Adelheid as always dominating the scenes where she has a role to play, the scientists of one persuasion or another interacting with fear and irritability in the face of the Nazi menace but always with the welfare of their charges in mind, and the nurses doing what nurses do when under unremitting stress.
Added to all this, is an element of mystery and intrigue. Why are the children disappearing? What is the substance of Dr A’s research? Is Hamburger a Nazi lover? Is Adelheid’s severe treatment of her father to be condoned given the strength of the feelings of both parties?
This book has the lot.
The Matchbox Girl
(2025)
by Alice Jolly
Bloomsbury
ISBN: 978-1-5266-8105-8
$29.69; 416 pp