Book Review

By Derryll White

Hill, Karen (2016). Café Babanussa

This novel has been published posthumously. Karen Hill was born in Newmarket, Ontario, and died in Toronto in 2014. In-between she lived through the 1980s in West Berlin. She was born into a creative family that included songwriter and folksinger Dan Hill and novelist Lawrence Hill, who wrote the forward to this novel.

I immediately warmed to Karen Hill’s sense of personal exploration. The early parts of the novel read like a very personal travel journal – open, exciting and warm. The author embraces change and her new sense of Europe, and freedom, with great anticipation. This is life as it should be for a young person venturing out on her own.

Karen Hill does a good, and scary, job of describing the effects of and reactions to bipolar disorder. It is not in any way a put-down of mental illness. Rather, she takes the reader through the fear and depression her character Susan experiences. One can’t help but feel for her and hope that she finds a way through to resuming a functional, stable life.

This book is Karen Hill’s journey- through debilitating sickness into a realization of who she is; through Berlin’s freedom and excesses; through a sense of unknowing into acceptance of her own blackness. It is honest, moving and a compelling read. She brought me to a better sense of myself in this strange and wonderful world.

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Excerpts from the novel:

BERLINER – “I’d hate to see you start up smoking dope, or anything else, god forbid.”

“What’s wrong with dope?”

“It will make you paranoid and make your mind lazy so that you can’t do anything else.”

“Jeez, Werner, you should have been in Reefer Madness – you’d be a good propagandist for the government. How does that sit with your anarchist ideals?”

LIFE – As they walked away, Willie yelled from the back seat, “You’ll never know what you missed!”

That’s truer than you know, she thought. Every time you make a choice you turn your back on other opportunities. I only hope I’m making the right one.

GERMANS — “Another German Scheisse, every time I’ve been in here, there’s been someone like her around. Cursing the Turks or the Jews, talking about the good ol’ days with Hitler when they all had work and dignity. Man. They’re so intelligent, they had to go kill off everyone that didn’t look like them. Look at what they did to my people! Executed as many as they could. And those who’re left? I know people who were born here, parents born here, grandparents born here. They still won’t give them no German passport. Just call us stinkin’ Gypsies.”

OPEN RELATIONSHIPS – She knew she couldn’t expect her father to understand how she could love one person and still get a kick out of messing around with someone else. Especially since she didn’t quite get it herself. Intellectually it made sense; she’d read all those books about Sartre and de Beauvoir, Hammett and Hellman, and the tyranny of marriage as a patriarchal institution. And she knew many Berliners who seemed to thrive in open relationships.

FUL – For each plate of ful, they would mash cooked fava beans with garlic, onion, tahini and olive oil, adding cumin, coriander, cardamom and lemon juice to taste. The beans would be spread out on a plate and then topped with finely chopped tomato, feta cheese and parsley and drizzled with more oi. Served with Turkish bread, much thicker than a pita, they would rip off pieces of bread and dip it into the ful. It was simple but sublime.

– Derryll White once wrote books but now chooses to read and write about them.  When not reading he writes history for the web at www.basininstitute.org.

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