Homestead
by Rosina Lippi

List Price: $12.00
Pages: none
Format: Paperback
ISBN: 0395977711
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin

Each life has its place, and every variation ripples the surface of the tiny alpine village called Rosenau. Be it a mysteriously misaddressed love letter or a girl's careless delivery of two helpless relatives into Nazi hands, the town's balance is ever tested, and ever tender. Here is a novel spanning eighty years -- years that bring factories and wars, store-bought cheese and city-trained teachers -- weaving the fates of the wives, mothers, and daughters in this remote corner of Austria. To quote Rosellen Brown, "the women in this haunting book are deeply and uniquely of their place, yet they speak (often wordlessly) of women's longings and satisfactions everywhere."

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1. What details of homestead life emerge in Rosina Lippi’s portrait of Rosenau?

2. In what ways, including two world wars, does the outside world impinge on the life of Rosenau between 1909 and 1977, and with what results? In what ways do these outside influences&emdash;for example, the Nazi abduction of Stante and Michel—change the lives of individual villagers and the community?

3. How does life differ for the married and single women of Rosenau? What are some of the changes that we witness over several generations?

4. How would you describe family life on the homesteads? In what ways does each family conform to convention and tradition, and in what ways does it diverge from them? How do relationships within and among Rosenau’s families develop over the years?

5. Johanna takes note of “the carefully drawn, precisely detailed world [Francesco] had created for himself” in his maps. What counter-worlds do some of the characters create for themselves? How are these worlds linked with or separated from the actual world? To what effect?

6. Johanna tells Francesco, “The women in the village know my family tree better than I do;” and Isabella, at 70, “can name every one of the three hundred sixty-three people who call Rosenau home.” What might be the benefits and drawbacks of having everyone know every detail about one’s life, family, and family history?

7. In 1917, “the weight” of waiting for word from Peter and for Peter’s return “seems to have tipped the [Sutterlüty] family out of balance and set them spinning haphazardly.” What other families or individuals seem “out of balance”? Do they ever regain their balance?

8. Angelika, Mikatrin, Olga (in a letter to her POW husband), and Martha are the only women to tell their stories directly. Why do you think the stories of these four—among all the women in the book&emdash;are told directly to us?

9. During the last year of World War II, Alois’s Katharina is surprised “to see that some things she thought everlasting . . . also had their limitations.” What things do the people of Rosenau, individually and in common, think of as everlasting? Which of those things do last, and which have “their limitations”?

10. How do the people of Rosenau memorialize their dead? In what ways do the dead remain in or revisit the lives of the living, and why?

11. Martha says that when she joins the women of her family who have died before her, “they will have embraced each other and merged into one woman who is mother and sister and aunt and daughter. And I will not have to choose between them.” In what ways might we say that the twelve storytellers in Homestead individually embrace all the female roles of mother, sister, aunt, and daughter and merge into one woman who is all women?

12. Grumpy Marie is the one female character present in Homestead from its beginning to nearly the end and the only major female character who does not have a story-chapter of her own. Why do you think this is so? In what ways does our view of Marie at 95, in the old folks’ home, change our earlier view of her as the spinster shopkeeper and postmistress?

13. Near the end of the book, Bent Elbow’s Martin’s Laura has a vision of the future in which “she saw children playing: the child she had lost . . . ; the other children she would bear or lose before she was forty; the grandchildren who come soon after.” What does this vision of the future have in common with the lives of the women who have preceded Laura? Does her vision sufficiently reflect the role and experiences of Rosenau’s women?

14. In “Anna,” Lippi writes that the men’s lives “were ruled by a simple cycle.” What is that cycle, and how does it rule the men’s lives? How does this cycle affect the women’s lives? What other cycles contribute to shaping the lives of Rosenau’s men and women?

15. Hans speaks Johanna’s name “like a man holding on to something he didn’t put much value on but called his own anyway.” To what extent is this representative of the Rosenau men’s attitude toward the women? Is it typical of only a few men in the village? If so, which ones and why?

16. What forms does love take—for example, Isabella’s love for her son, Peter, and Johanna’s love for Francesco? What role do the various kinds of love play in the cohesion of family and village life?

17. Married to Alois for nearly fifty years, Isabella thinks that her husband’s comment, “Better ice that melts than fire that gives out,” expresses “the simple truth of marriage.” Why does this seem true for all the marriages in the book, or why not? What other “truths of marriage” emerge in these stories?

18. In what ways does Lilimarlene’s return to Rosenau contrast with her mother, Katharina’s desire to get away? What does Kaspar’s Jos mean when he tells Lilimarlene, near the book’s end, “You don’t need a reason to come home . . . You need a reason to stay away”? How does this apply to every one of the book’s main characters?

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"Each of the 12 keenly observed, interconnected stories in this absorbing debut collection focuses on an epochal moment in the life of one of three generations of women in the tiny Austrian town of Rosenau and the surrounding homesteads. Although Rosenau is bounded on all sides by the Alps, there is a slow influx of events from the outside world. When the book opens in 1909, a postcard arrives at the general store, and the effects of this brief misaddressed note ripple the surface of the isolated hamlet. Later, many men fail to return from the front during WWI; meanwhile, their families live in suspended fear about their fate. In a moving and poignant tale, an Italian deserter seeks protection and comforts a lonely woman who has never had a lover. During the next war, a German soldier arrives in a gleaming Daimler and carries off the town's two feeble boys to their doom. Each of these events upsets the town's equilibrium. But by the time the book closes in 1977, the effects of these foreign intrusions have been absorbed in the continuing cycles of birth, marriage, death and the changing seasons. Having herself lived for some years in the Bregenz Forest area of western Austria, Lippi conveys a haunting sense of place and a pervasive social code. Clan charts and a glossary explain the archaic language and distinctive conventions of the region, but it is the cumulative effect of the stories themselves that envelops the reader in a time and place that is at once strange and universal. "

—Publishers Weekly

"This is a novel of great depth, compassion and tenderness. "

—Brigitte Frase The New York Times

"The setting for this poignant novel is Rosenau, an isolated Austrian Village, and the story encompasses generations of villagers and their intimate lives. The magic of the novel lies in the author's ability to make the faraway seem familiar, even when it is tragic or brutal. Structured as short stories told from the viewpoints of different members of the village, the novel follows their intertwined lives from 1909 through 1977, layering story upon story to develop the village and the characters. Lippi's characters are nothing short of wonderful. There is, for example, Johanna, whose heart is torn between her love for Francesco--a soldier hiding in the Austrian Alps--and her sister Angelika, who hides her dependence upon Johanna behind not-so-subtle reminders of familial duty. And there is Katharina, whose impulsiveness causes her to betray her two half-brothers for a ride in a Nazi motorcar, and Stante, who proves his worth not only in the Wainwright's workshop but also by his courage withstanding the Nazis. The character portrayals are based upon Lippi's own experiences living in Austria for four years. You'll hate for these stories to end. "

—Amazon.com