REVIEW:

If books wore shoes, What You Can See from Here would wear slippers. It plods along so softly that you barely notice its forward movement. Then it kicks you gently in the shin to say, pay attention, I’m here and something just happened.

Originally published in German in 2017, it is primarily the story of young Luisa and her grandmother, Selma, living life in small town Germany. Whenever Selma dreams of an okapi, someone always seems to die. (Get your fingers ready to google… an okapi is a real animal that looks like a cross between a zebra and a giraffe.) The book never truly enters magical realism territory but rather hovers close to superstition, making it feel like a 20th century European fable.

It’s an odd book full of quirky characters and head-scratching plot lines. The theme of Buddhism is largely explored, along with ruminations on ill-fated love and grief. It’s a story I liked but wish I had loved. Perhaps a little was lost in translation.

I wish to thank the author and Farrar, Straus and Giroux for providing me with an advance copy to review via NetGalley. What You Can See from Here is now available.

PUBLISHER SYNOPSIS:

A small village helps a young woman reckon with loss and love in this heartwarming novel by the award-winning writer Mariana Leky.

On a beautiful spring day, a small village in Western Germany wakes up to an omen: Selma has dreamed of an okapi. Someone is about to die.

Luise, Selma’s ten-year-old granddaughter, looks on as the predictable characters of her small world begin acting strangely. Protesting that they are not superstitious, each of the villagers grapples with the buried secrets and deferred decisions that have suddenly become urgent in the face of death.

Luise’s mother struggles to decide whether to end her marriage. An old family friend, known only as the optician, tries to find the courage to tell Selma he loves her. Only Sad Marlies remains unchanged, still moping around her house and cooking terrible food. But when death finally comes, the circumstances are outside anyone’s expectations.

Across three defining moments in her life, Luise grapples with life's big questions alongside her devoted friends, young and old. A story about the absurdity of life and death, a bittersweet portrait of village life and the wider world that beckons beyond, it is also a thoughtful meditation on the way loss and love shape not just a person, but a community. Mariana Leky's What You Can See from Here is a charmer — a moving novel of grief, first love, reluctant love, late love, and finding one's place in the world, even if that place is right where you started.