Just before she dies, the writer’s mother leaves her with a difficult secret and an urge to retrieve the past. After years of trawling through family archives, she realises the difficulty, if not the impossibility, of doing so. However, the writer discovers a passionate and moving love story, which becomes the core of this book.
The Sinners’ Bench uses different modes and tones to tell a story. There are extracts from letters, homespun publications, family myths and stories, childhood memories and photographs. The personal story is conveyed as a memoir, which is embedded in family history. This history is explored as part of the history and culture of the German Lutheran missionaries in South Africa. The story is imbued with a sense of everything arising and passing. Wars are started and peace is made, people migrate and find a new home, kittens are born and drowned, new generations take centre stage and make space for the next one.
In this richly detailed memoir, Maren Bodenstein tells the story of a complicated family with a secret at its heart. Whether capturing the inner world of a young child in a mission village or traversing the complex emotional terrain of ageing, she writes with insight and precision, with a sense of wonder but no trace of sentimentality. This is a lovely book that brings new worlds into view. – Ivan Vladislavić
