Ursula Hegi: Hotel of the Saints

By ELSPETH SANDYS

Ever since reading Ursula Hegi's magnificent novel, Stones from the River, I have been wanting to read more of her work. Stones from the River, a tour de force of storytelling covering more than half the 20th century, followed the fortunes of a remote German village and a father and his dwarf daughter.

It explored territory familiar to readers of Gunter Grass - the aftermath of two devastating wars, but particularly World War II. Since its publication other writers have investigated the same moral universe, most recently Bernard Schlink and Rachel Seiffert. But none has done it better than Ursula Hegi.

Hotel of the Saints, a collection of 11 thematically linked but otherwise disparate stories, returns only briefly to the theme of German guilt and responsibility, but the same concerns as were present in Stones from the River return, in different form, in these haunting tales of people living on the edge.

The search for understanding, the need to forgive, the grace that comes through reconciliation are the themes that bind the collection and give it its particular resonance. "I want to know what happens to people when they no longer have whatever it was that once used to sustain them," Libby asks her sister in the final story, Lower Crossing. The answer doesn't come till the penultimate page.

"I can believe what I already know in my gut," Libby answers herself, "that what nurtures us will also sustain us at times of pain."

It is for insights like this and the comfort they bring that I so enjoy reading Ursula Hegi.

Hegi lives with her family in New York State, but her background is German. Experience of different cultures, and the misunderstandings that arise in cross-cultural encounters, informs all Hegi's work, nowhere more so than in these stories, set in the United States, Italy and Germany.

The "Amerikaner", we are told in the story titled A Town Like Ours, set in Germany in the 1950s, don't want to understand that we suffered too.

In Moonwalkers, an elderly Austrian emigrant to the US urges his son not to make a coward's choice. What this means, other than a father's need to instill physical courage in his son, is left vague.

But, as with most of Hegi's stories, this one ends on a note of forgiveness and reconciliation.

Wonderful characters stalk the pages: Francine, who discovers through country and western music a way to live with her loneliness; the mother forced to confront the difference between love and need for her daughter; the elderly man who has a heart replacement and becomes obsessed with the story of his young female donor; the woman who finds happiness with a violent ex-criminal; the widow who loses her fear of life after the death of her over-protective husband; the elderly woman with cancer who, out of concern for her children, finds a way to commit suicide that looks like an accident.

So great is Hegi's gift for empathy I identified with all her characters, celebrating their eccentricities, urging them on in their quest for understanding and acceptance of life's illogicality. A stunning collection, with the added joy of being generously bound, and printed on paper of the highest quality.

Simon and Schuster

$49.95

* Elspeth Sandys' most recent novel is A Passing Guest.