REREAD: The Star of Kazan
Aug. 19th, 2023 04:05 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
feather_ghyllThe Star of Kazan: Eva Ibbotson, Macmillan, 2004.
I didn’t remember much about this book (only the fate of Rocco the horse, really) so rereading this almost felt like reading a new book, except it had that sense of things proceeding as they ought as so much of Ibbotson’s writing does, and some of that came from some dim memories of first reading it. (This was the my post about it at the time, which also discusses ‘Blue of the Sea’ by L.T. Meade.)
This is the story of a foundling whose dream of her mother returning to her came true, this is the story of how some dreams take on the quality of a nightmare, this is a story about finding a family bound by love, not blood. It’s also a love letter to Vienna, set in the first decade of the twentieth century.
The story’s heroine is the very likeable Annika, abandoned as a very young baby, but found by Ellie, a cook. Thanks to an outbreak of typhus at the local convent, Annika stayed in the same household as Ellie, who became her de factor mother, with Sigrid the maid her de facto aunt, and the professors who employed Ellie and Sigrid becoming her uncles and aunts eventually. The story starts properly when she’s around 12, thoroughly a part of life in her Viennese square, where her two best friends of her own age live, Pauline and Stefan. Annika has been educated not only in what any schoolgirl her age would be taught, but in geology, art history, the caretaking of harps and, more practically, in cleaning and cooking. Indeed, she has a real gift for cooking. The only fly in her ointment is spoilt Loremarie Egghart. Nonetheless, every night, Annika can’t help but imagining that some day, a beautiful woman will turn up at the front door having come for her daughter.
When that very thing actually happens, Annika is bowled over by the beautiful, aristocratic woman who has proof that convinces the professors (who don’t want helpful, life-affirming Annika to leave, while Ellie and Sigrid are devastated.) Edeltraut von Tannenberg tells Annika a story of a faithless man who looked a lot like her, another faithless man who turned out to be a gambler, who left for the United States at around the same time as Edeltraut’s father died. She whisks Annika away from Vienna with its Lipizzaner horses, its glorious food and all that Annika has ever known to a damp fortress called Spittal in Germany. There, Annika must stop gravitating towards the kitchen and its warmth now that she is a ‘von’, an aristocrat who has to behave a certain way that she finds unnatural. But it is all wonderful, Annika tells herself, because of her mother.
Snobbishness is contrasted with kindness, especially as Annika finds a true friend not in her half-brother Hermann or cousin Gundrun, but in Zed, the half gypsy boy who lets her take care of the beautiful horse Rocco and who is beneath notice according to the van Tannenbergs. The reader is given quite a puzzler in the flashbacks to the Freiherr, Edeltraut van Tannenberg’s now dead father. Wouldn’t such a man, who knew horses and behaved honourably, have been more sympathetic to his daughter if she’d been deceived as a young woman and left expecting a child?
Other questions are puzzling everyone left behind in Vienna, who are not satisfied with Annika’s letters from Spittal. Annika herself is surprised when a photograph connected to her Viennese life most unexpectedly turns up in Spittal and is forced to either believe that her adored mother or friend Zed lied. I loved how the slandered Zed, just like Stefan and Pauline in their own ways, comes through for Annika, leading to a dramatic rescue and a thorough liberation from a tissue of lies that were making her miserable.
Ibbotson has a satiric swipe at early twentieth-century German imperialism, from the von Tanennberg family motto, ‘Stand Aside, Ye Vermin Who Oppose Us!’ to the school that Annika ends up being sent to, which is worse than Jane Eyre’s Lowood. Apparently it is training its pupils for the fatherland.
I haven’t even directly mentioned the subplot that gives the book its title or the way Rocco finds a special stall in Vienna! It’s just a lovely, lovely book, adapting the romance of the foundling girl to a specific time and place, rich and wise.
I didn’t remember much about this book (only the fate of Rocco the horse, really) so rereading this almost felt like reading a new book, except it had that sense of things proceeding as they ought as so much of Ibbotson’s writing does, and some of that came from some dim memories of first reading it. (This was the my post about it at the time, which also discusses ‘Blue of the Sea’ by L.T. Meade.)
This is the story of a foundling whose dream of her mother returning to her came true, this is the story of how some dreams take on the quality of a nightmare, this is a story about finding a family bound by love, not blood. It’s also a love letter to Vienna, set in the first decade of the twentieth century.
The story’s heroine is the very likeable Annika, abandoned as a very young baby, but found by Ellie, a cook. Thanks to an outbreak of typhus at the local convent, Annika stayed in the same household as Ellie, who became her de factor mother, with Sigrid the maid her de facto aunt, and the professors who employed Ellie and Sigrid becoming her uncles and aunts eventually. The story starts properly when she’s around 12, thoroughly a part of life in her Viennese square, where her two best friends of her own age live, Pauline and Stefan. Annika has been educated not only in what any schoolgirl her age would be taught, but in geology, art history, the caretaking of harps and, more practically, in cleaning and cooking. Indeed, she has a real gift for cooking. The only fly in her ointment is spoilt Loremarie Egghart. Nonetheless, every night, Annika can’t help but imagining that some day, a beautiful woman will turn up at the front door having come for her daughter.
When that very thing actually happens, Annika is bowled over by the beautiful, aristocratic woman who has proof that convinces the professors (who don’t want helpful, life-affirming Annika to leave, while Ellie and Sigrid are devastated.) Edeltraut von Tannenberg tells Annika a story of a faithless man who looked a lot like her, another faithless man who turned out to be a gambler, who left for the United States at around the same time as Edeltraut’s father died. She whisks Annika away from Vienna with its Lipizzaner horses, its glorious food and all that Annika has ever known to a damp fortress called Spittal in Germany. There, Annika must stop gravitating towards the kitchen and its warmth now that she is a ‘von’, an aristocrat who has to behave a certain way that she finds unnatural. But it is all wonderful, Annika tells herself, because of her mother.
Snobbishness is contrasted with kindness, especially as Annika finds a true friend not in her half-brother Hermann or cousin Gundrun, but in Zed, the half gypsy boy who lets her take care of the beautiful horse Rocco and who is beneath notice according to the van Tannenbergs. The reader is given quite a puzzler in the flashbacks to the Freiherr, Edeltraut van Tannenberg’s now dead father. Wouldn’t such a man, who knew horses and behaved honourably, have been more sympathetic to his daughter if she’d been deceived as a young woman and left expecting a child?
Other questions are puzzling everyone left behind in Vienna, who are not satisfied with Annika’s letters from Spittal. Annika herself is surprised when a photograph connected to her Viennese life most unexpectedly turns up in Spittal and is forced to either believe that her adored mother or friend Zed lied. I loved how the slandered Zed, just like Stefan and Pauline in their own ways, comes through for Annika, leading to a dramatic rescue and a thorough liberation from a tissue of lies that were making her miserable.
Ibbotson has a satiric swipe at early twentieth-century German imperialism, from the von Tanennberg family motto, ‘Stand Aside, Ye Vermin Who Oppose Us!’ to the school that Annika ends up being sent to, which is worse than Jane Eyre’s Lowood. Apparently it is training its pupils for the fatherland.
I haven’t even directly mentioned the subplot that gives the book its title or the way Rocco finds a special stall in Vienna! It’s just a lovely, lovely book, adapting the romance of the foundling girl to a specific time and place, rich and wise.
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