Rachel Seiffert's first novel, The Dark Room,developed in Glasgow for the MLitt in Creative Writing course which is taught by jointly by the Universities of Glasgow and Strathclyde, has been shortlisted for the 2001 Booker Prize.

Information about the Novel

The Dark Room by Rachel Seiffert
(Heinemann, £12.99)

What has it meant to be German in the twentieth century? What has it meant to be the child of German parents, the daughter of members of the Nazi party, the grandson of a grandfather who was in the Waffen SS, the father of a German child? The Dark Room tells the stories of three ordinary twentieth century Germans: Helmut, a young patriotic photographer in 1930s Berlin; Lore, a twelve year old girl who crosses Germany in 1945 with her siblings after her Nazi parents are seized by the Allies, and, half a century later, Micha, a young teacher obsessed with what his grandfather did in the war.

• A boy born with a physical deformity finds work as a photographer's assistant during the 1930s and captures on film the changing temper of Berlin, the city he loves. But his acute photographic eye never provides him with the power to understand the significance of what he sees through his camera. In the weeks following Germany's surrender,
• a teenage girl whose parents are both in Allied captivity takes her younger siblings on a terrifying, illegal journey through the four zones of occupation in search of her grandmother.
• Many years after the event, a young man trying to discover why the Russians imprisoned his grandfather for nine years after the war meets resistance at every turn; the only person who agrees, reluctantly, to help him has his own tainted past to contend with.

With dazzling originality and to profound effect, Rachel Seiffert has recreated one of the darkest moments of the twentieth century.

Biography

Rachel Seiffert was born in Oxford in January 1971. She is the daughter of a German mother and Australian father. She spent most of her life in Oxford and Glasgow and was bullied at school for being a 'Nazi' so had a strong sense as a child that being German meant being bad. She got a First in Film and Literature at Bristol, and worked at writing and editing short films and features notably at th Glasgow Film and Video Workshop - experience which has contributed to the extremely disciplined and pared-down nature of her style. She lives in Berlin. The Dark Room is her first novel.

Reviews

• "Rachel Seiffert writes movingly about three generations of Germans confined by selective blindness and silence: a patriotic photographer who limits his vision to the eye of the camera; a courageous refugee girl who stays focused on her own family's suffering; and a teacher who is compelled and yet terrified to pursue his search for the truth. Outstanding." -Ursula Hegi, author of Stones from the River

• "The dark room of this book's title is both a literal darkroom of a photographer and a metaphor for a place in which things are both invisible and partially visible, that place being Germany and its recent history. Rachel Seiffert's storytelling is completely absorbing and finally overwhelming in its detail, its relentless action, and its beautiful, shy eloquence. The Dark Room, in its strategies for approaching the unwatchable, the unseeable, is brilliant, and in its closing pages, it brings to light a set of images that no reader is ever likely to forget." - Charles Baxter, author of Feast of Love

• "[A] stunning debut novel, Seiffert writes with such extraordinary elegance that it takes your breath away. Her voice stings with aching precision yet possesses a glorious innocence that can trouble the simplest of words. The effortlessness of her language is remarkable given the complexity of perpectives she entertains. The tension of being implicitly involved in a history one did not necessarily condone is stretched agonizingly taut through Seiffert's quiet exploration of the subtle complexities of competing perceptions within a self, within a family, within a nation." -Camilla Gibb, Globe and Mail

• "It's a painful subject and no less so in Seiffert's handling of it. The reading itself, though, is easy. The airiness of Seiffert's prose, her deft management of the present tense, makes the narrator - even the page - disappear. In The Dark Room reading is more like watching - through the lens of a camera. Although she is loath to comment, the very structure of her novel reminds us that history is composed of our individual stories." -Toronto Star

• "[An] ambitious and powerful first novel, Seiffert writes lean, clean prose. Deftly, she hangs large ideas on the vivid private experiences of her principal characters." -New York Times

• "Seiffert's The Dark Room reminds me of Bernhard Schlink's The Reader, but unlike that [book], The Dark Room never veers away from its fictional roots. The ability to internalize her research and make it so much a part of the background that it barely shows through is one of the great strengths of The Dark Room. It doesn't read like a first novel. It would be easier for all of us simply to get on with the present and leave the past to moulder. That would be not only wrong, but dangerous, which is yet another reason to read The Dark Room." -Sandra Martin, Globe and Mail

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First published: 20 September 2001