Novel is a tale of grief and rebirth
The Patron Saint of Pregnant Girls
Ursula Hegi Flatiron Books
In January 1362, a vast tidal surge in the North Sea killed more than 25,000 people in a region that now encompasses parts of Britain, Germany, Denmark and the Low Countries. Known as the Grote Mandrenke, “the great drowning of men,” the storm reshaped entire coastlines, submerging towns and breaking apart islands. Among the latter was Strand, in present-day northern Germany, where the sea swallowed the prosperous town of Rungholt.
Nearly three centuries later in 1634, another devastating storm killed 6,000 people and carved off the peninsular town of Nordstrand from what remained of Strand. It is here, on a summer day in 1878, that Lotte Jansen is playing on the beach with her four young children when another (this time fictional) rogue wave engulfs them and rips three of the children from her hands. Only Lotte and the youngest, infant Wilhelm, survive. From this nearly incomprehensible tragedy, novelist Ursula Hegi spins a surprisingly sunlit tale of grief and rebirth, drawing on history and folklore to create an indelible portrait of a family and community forged in crisis.
A U.S. citizen since moving here from Germany as a young adult, Hegi is known for her novels set in Burgdorf, Germany, during and after the Second World War; books in which she deploys a rare gift for depicting outsiders — most memorably Trudi Montag, the young woman with dwarfism who’s a central character in Hegi’s bestselling Stones From the River. In her new book, The Patron Saint of Pregnant Girls, Hegi performs a kind of alchemical cartography, transporting readers to a place so vividly rendered they may undergo culture shock upon re-entering our own damaged world.
Nordstrand’s bleak, quicksilver beauty mirrors the mercurial fortunes of its inhabitants. In the moments after the freak wave, Lotte kisses baby Wilhelm and tosses him, too, into the ocean. “Take him, God, in return for my other three,” she cries, her act witnessed by the villagers who’ve rushed to search for the children. Lotte’s husband, Kalle Jansen, saves Wilhelm. Unable to forgive his wife for this momentary madness, or his infant son for surviving when his other three children drowned, Kalle joins a travelling circus that makes regular rounds through Nordstrand, abandoning Lotte and Wilhelm.
Everyone in Nordstrand seems to have stepped from a folk tale or a canvas by the Biedermeier-style painter Carl Spitzweg. Sabine, the circus’s seamstress and Lotte’s close friend, lives in a circus wagon with her daughter, Heike, who’s 20 but has the mind of a child. When honey begins to flow down her wagon’s walls, Sabine discovers it houses an immense beehive. It’s a neat metaphor for Hegi’s novel, in which myriad coteries — families, the girls and nuns at St. Margaret, the circus and the Old Women who act as Nordstrand’s Greek chorus — coexist yet remain mysterious to one another, each possessing its own hidden sweetness.