Review of TASTING SUNLIGHT by Ewald Arenz (New Release)

 5 Stars

I know I’m not the first to describe this book as magical, but that is the perfect adjective for it.

Seventeen-year-old Sally runs away from a clinic where she was being treated for anorexia.  She meets Liss, a woman in her forties, who lives alone on a large farm.  Liss offers Sally a place to stay.  Gradually Sally helps Liss with various tasks on the farm and a friendship develops between the two.  As their backstories are slowly revealed, it becomes obvious that both are in need of healing.

Sally likes Liss almost immediately because she doesn’t ask probing questions, accepts her as she is, and expects nothing of her.  She gives Sally peace and quiet and space, all the things she feels she doesn’t have in her life.  She has a difficult relationship with her parents who keep trying to shape her life in a way that is a mirror image of theirs:  “How was it possible to be the child of parents who were just wrong for you, right from the start?” 

Liss sees much of her younger self in Sally.  When she was young, she too was not allowed to make her own choices; she too feels she had not “grown up in the right soil.”  Her father was very controlling:  “’Reading was out of order.  Listening to music was out of order.  Leaving things as they are was right out of order.  You can tie trees to a stake to make them grow straight.  All his life he thought you could do that to people too.’”

The two main characters are so authentic.  Both are flawed; they share an anger at the world which has forced restricted lives on them “Because it’s not acceptable for everything just to grow however it likes.”  Yet there is in them a deep humanity.  For instance, Liss sees Sally’s intelligence:  “it was like she wasn’t doing it for the first time. . . . she grasped what it was about so quickly.  You didn’t often have to show her things.”  For her part, Sally accepts Liss’s reticence:  “to be honest, she didn’t like always being asked things either.  It was OK.  She got that. . . .It was OK.” 

Also authentic is the development of the friendship.  Initially they are tentative around each other.  Liss hesitates to ask questions because “Every question and every answer spun a thread” and “One thread becomes threads and threads become cords and cords are woven into a net.”  For her part, Sally is distrustful since she has found adults to be insincere; she describes their “soft, sympathetic, empathetic voices” trying to hide their “fake wall of professional niceness and warmth and understanding.”  Gradually they come to enjoy each other’s company:  “Sometimes it felt good to work together.  Because the other person ensured that you recognized your own place in the whole.  All of a sudden, you had a significance in a whole, and weren’t simply existing.”

The book emphasizes the power of nature to heal.  As Sally and Liss pick potatoes, tend to bees, pick pears, and harvest grapes, they follow the rhythms of nature.  Sally realizes how the countryside has become real to her:  “Maybe it had been all the points of contact with the earth.  When had she ever had her hands in the soil before?  Bees on her skin?  When had she stood in a tree?”  While on the farm, a beautiful autumn day leaves her thinking “It was as though the world wanted to show her once more how beautiful it could be, how many colours it had, how fresh it could smell.”  The two women who both are non-conformists find comfort in nature:  “’That’s the lovely thing about nature.  It doesn’t conform to what we think is right.  Even if some people try to force it to grow the way they like it.’”  As I read, I often thought of the poems of Wordsworth and Coleridge which have a similar message about the beauty and power of the natural world.

Nature is described in beautiful lyrical prose.  The view from a ruined castle is detailed:  “It was as though you could see across the whole country.  The river was a never-ending ribbon that at some point just melted into the horizon.  Towns and villages lay scattered between the vineyards, which went on forever.  Right in the distance, to the north, rose a row of mountains, a shade darker than the mist.  It was a picture like still water; as if you were quenching a thirst that you hadn’t previously noticed.”  The writing is so evocative that not only can we see the views, we can also feel the wind, taste the pears, hear the cackling of the chickens, and smell the fermenting fruit.  I can’t read German, but nothing seems to have been lost in translation.  Reading the novel is like tasting sunlight, so the title is perfect!

The ending is heart-warming.  The dance scene in the penultimate chapter, especially when the icing sugar is mentioned, made me want to dance along.  Just as the hard work on the farm is not minimized, there is also not an easy solution to all problems, but the “’two will look after each other, yes!’” 

This book will undoubtedly be on my list of best reads this year.