Anna Kim: "A Child's Story" - Nominated for the German Book Prize
Created: 09/26/2022, 18:00
By: Sven Trautwein
With “Story of a Child”, Anna Kim has written a touching and stirring novel that is based on a true life story.
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The German Book Prize is awarded on the eve of the Frankfurt Book Fair.
20 titles were on the longlist, six of which made it to the final.
Anna Kim's "Story of a Child" is a book that touches.
The story is based on a true life story, making it even more immersive and stirring.
Even if the book is not on the shortlist, it belongs on every bookshelf and on every reading list.
Anna Kim "A Child's Story": About the Book
Anna Kim “A Child's Story” © Suhrkamp
In July 1953, twenty-year-old telephone operator Carol Truttman gave birth to a child in a small town in the US state of Wisconsin.
That same night she gives the boy up for adoption.
Daniel, as he is called, remains in the care of a social service.
The nannies caring for them are soon confronted with what they consider to be a serious suspicion: Contrary to what the mother said, the baby does not appear to be “white” but, as the official language of the time called it, “Indian”, » Polish« or »Negrid« – a scandal in a homogeneously white society subject to the rigorous laws of racial segregation.
A social worker is to determine the true ethnic origin of the child.
To do this, however, she must find the father of the child,
Suhrkamp
Anna Kim's "Story of a Child" offers two main strands.
On the one hand there is the first-person narrator Franziska, daughter of a South Korean mother and a German father, who lives as an author in Austria.
She came to Green Bay in the USA on a scholarship.
They get closer in conversations with their landlady, until she tells them about her husband Danny, who was the only African American in Green Bay.
Daniel, born in 1953, was given up for adoption by his mother and looked after by social services because the baby was "different" and "not white".
Anna Kim - author of "A Child's Story" © Werner Geiger/Suhrkamp Verlag
Anna Kim knows exactly what she writes about.
Born in South Korea in 1977, she came to Germany with her family at the age of two and later moved on to Vienna, where she now lives and works.
The author probably experienced “racial profiling”, in which people are only classified and checked on the basis of their physical appearance, when she was young.
In this way, “A Child's Story” is a complex and multi-layered novel that also tells her story in a certain way.
Anna Kim "Story of a Child": My conclusion
Alternating between first-person narration and dry language rendering of the files about Daniel, Anna Kim takes the reader deep into the story.
It also keeps you busy after you've read the novel and makes you think.
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Anna Kim "Story of a Child"
2022 Suhrkamp, ISBN-13 978-3-518-43056-9
Price: Hardcover €23, e-book €19.99, 220 pages (different format) – Order now (promotional link)
Anna Kim
Anna Kim was born in South Korea in 1977, moved to Germany with her family in 1979 and finally to Vienna, where the author lives today.
She has received numerous grants and awards for her narrative and essayistic work, including the European Union Prize for Literature.