It’s cool to read a book about an obscure topic. Earlier this school year, I reviewed a very interesting novel that was set during the flu epidemics that took place during World War I. In doing so I learned a lot about influenza, logging and the war machine in the early 1900s. So when I got the opportunity to read and review Split Creek by V.O. Blum, I was excited to learn about something new-namely, American camps for German prisoners of war during World War II. Thousands of captured soldiers were sent to camps all over the U.S. to work on farms and make themselves useful while getting a dose of “denazification.” It’s an interesting and, as far as I know, pretty much unexplored topic.
But there’s a catch. Sometimes one gets the sense that an author is trying reeeeeally hard to impress readers. Split Creek, while at times fascinating and informative, gets weighted down by its author’s self-admiration.
Split Creek tells the story of Friedrich Dassen, a German POW lieutenant interred in the American West in 1943. As an officer, he doesn’t have to work the fields along with enlisted men, and he spends his leisure time learning about democracy, riding a horse, makin’ it with a fine (fascist) lady and getting up to no good.
An impressionable lad with no political convictions of his own, Dassen is drawn into a group of American fascists while simultaneously learning to appreciate the American way of life. Dassen’s mother is a prominent member of the socialist resistance in Germany, and his girlfriend Helen is a great admirer of the Nazi party. Dassen, rather than being torn between the two groups, remains somewhat ambivalent in his political beliefs, stopping to consider the discrepancy only when something terrible happens. Torn between his mother’s socialism and his girlfriend’s fascism, Dassen eventually settles on democracy as the ideal, but not until he loses loved ones on both sides.
Through Dassen, Blum shows an impressive understanding of politics, philosophy and 20th century history. The book seems meticulously researched and tells an interesting story. The quality of the writing is good enough, although the plot and dialogue can seem highly contrived.
The author also makes the strange choice to include unnecessary German phrases with bracketed translations. If he’s already bothering to translate the dialogue, why insert translatable phrases into the narrative? It’s like he’s showing off his knowledge of wartime conversational German, but it only serves to break up the dialogue and distract the reader.
The book also contains some highly improbable and superfluous sex scenes, some of which involve tantric sex (and how, pray tell, did a kid growing up in Nazi Germany get his hands on sitar music and the Kama Sutra? Seriously). Call me a prude, but I don’t need to read about turgid lingams in the middle of a book about the experiences of a POW during World War II. The rationalization for the steamy scenes is Helen’s desire for a real Nazi baby all her own, but they seem forced and a bit masturbatory on the part of the author.
The convolutions of the plot take away from what merits the story offers, and there are many. The convenient, meaningful deaths that take place, a weird non-twist toward the end, and the way the story just seems to lose its steam before simply ending make this a highly flawed effort.
It’s not that it’s a bad book, per se. I suspect that Blum just needs an editor to tell him when to rein it in a bit, someone to trim the fat and cut out all the tantra and about 80 percent of the German words.
But here’s the thing: I’ve been known to stay up all night or skip class just to spend a few more blessed hours reading a book-anything from Shakespeare to Stephen King to the Harry Potter series-so I obviously don’t need the finest quality literature for my book binges. But this book put me to sleep almost every time I picked it up, even in the middle of the afternoon, even when I wasn’t particularly tired. After a while my brain just shut off from all the bad dialogue and icky sex scenes.
To make it worse, I spent most of winter break so fucking bored that I was close to pulling out my hair and weaving it into a rug for something, anything at all to do, yet it took me a week to get through the scant 220 pages that make up this book. At my normal rate, this book should have taken maybe three or four hours with breaks to smoke and eat.
Perhaps Blum should switch to non-fiction. Then his gift for historical research would have a more honest and useful forum, and the world would no longer be exposed to such amateur plot contrivances and gross sex scenes. The novel is a difficult medium, and one that Blum has yet to master.