Katharine Hacker: The Have-Nots

The Have-Nots was first published in Germany in 2006. It was the winner of the 2006 German Book Prize for best novel. The prize is richly deserved. This is a complex narrative, melding individual concerns and social issues into a highly charged, gripping text. Hacker excels at building tension and the level rises from the very first page where we are introduced to Dave and his young sister Sara, who have just moved with their angry father to Lady Margaret Road in Kentish Town, London. There is no immediate further explanation of Dave and Sara, who disappear from the story for a while as Hacker moves us over to Berlin on the day after the destruction of the World Trade Center in New York. What should have been a party is a gaggle of disbelievers watching the continual replays of the collapse of the towers on television. Isabelle is one of them. Jakob is another. Jakob has just returned from New York. One of his legal colleagues has died in the catastrophe. Ten years before, Jakob and Isabelle had shared an afternoon in Freiburg. Now, in the uncertainty of September 2001, they begin an affair and marry. In Hacker's competent narrative hands this occurs seamlessly, but the reader is left with nagging doubts. How does Hans, Jakob's friend from university, feel about this? Hacker gives her readers a few clues as the narrative relentlessly progresses, but always there is doubt and a deliberate, disconcerting lack of clarity.