Unexploded Ordnance - by Catharina Coenen (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

WINNER OF THE 2023 RESTLESS BOOKS PRIZE FOR NEW IMMIGRANT WRITING

In imaginative prose that interrogates the past with a poet's curiosity and a scientist's pen, Unexploded Ordnance seeks to answer how we are shaped by the stories we inherit.

After moving from Germany to the US to work as a professor of biology, Catharina Coenen takes up residence in a second language to voice the questions she could not ask at home. To what extent was her grandfather implicated in World War II? What exactly did her grandmother, mother, and aunt live through? And why are women's wartime stories so seldom told? Coenen peels back generational silences to walk alongside her grandmother, who comes of age during Hitler's rise to power, watches friends disappear one by one, and flees bombing raids with her tiny daughters. Weaving reflections on language, biology, queerness, art, and memory, Coenen moves between the personal and the universal with stunning honesty and elegance.

Review Quotes

"A lyrical excavation of silence, memory, and the hidden traumas that echo across generations."

- Foreword Reviews, Starred Review

"Coenen, a German-born American botanist, has written an arresting collection of essays on what it means to live with political guilt, social trauma, and the unspoken memories not just of what Germany did in World War II, but of what was done to Germany during the conflict. . . . 'The scientist in me pores over . . . data, ' she says. But the writer in her recognizes that sometimes you must come to terms with stories that cannot be pegged into a graph or spreadsheet. A memoir of unbearable honesty about a German woman reckoning with war, family, and forgiveness."

-- Kirkus Reviews

"Coenen artfully connects her family's personal experiences to larger traumas of the period. The result is a poetic and deeply felt exploration of the long shadow cast by the war."

-- Publisher's Weekly

"From every hint, in every briefly shared memory, Coenen pieced together her family's story. Exquisitely told, this heartbreaking collection will strike you to the core."

-- Booklist

"A work of tremendous emotional and intellectual heft. . . . In lucid and lyrical prose, Catharina Coenen pieces together fragments of her German family's history through Hitler's rise to power, WWII, and its aftermath. Writing in the English gives this poet and botanist a new language in which to explore the legacies of a people silenced by trauma and guilt. Coenen focuses on her family, but the narrative expands to include the universal realities of war. She channels her ancestors and witnesses with them the violences they both experienced and participated in, violences that will continue to reverberate through generations until they can be acknowledged and mourned. A beautiful and tenderly rendered debut."

-- Carmel Mc Mahon, author of In Ordinary Time

"A brilliant and wide-eyed collection of essays about the legacy (and inheritance) of trauma. Unexploded Ordnance is a bullet of a book; one that challenged my perception of what nonfiction can do--and be."

-- Jiaming Tang, author of Cinema Love

"A triumph in gripping, masterful prose chronicling the lives of three generations of German women marked by war. What do we know when we know our mother's, our grandmother's stories? With each perfectly nuanced essay, Unexploded Ordnance reminds us of the silences we must choose to break. A poignant and unforgettable debut!"

-- Ani Gjika, author of An Unruled Body

"What makes Unexploded Ordnance unusual is its range--you'll notice it from the table of contents onward, this rat-tat-tat of memoir, history, biology, philosophy, linguistics. But what makes it so singular, so special, is how these disparate parts come together, come alive. I read it, entranced--it's a book that should be impossible, yet here it is."

-- Menachem Kaiser, author of Plunder: A Memoir of Family Property and Nazi Treasure