Book Review: Elly
Elly is the debut novel from Berlin-based filmmaker and short story writer Maike Wetzel, translated to English by Lyn Marven. Eerie and lyrical, it offers a unique twist on the well-worn missing persons archetype.
Eleven-year-old Elly is cycling to a judo class when she disappears. With no witnesses and no clues, the police presume her dead and move on, leaving her sister and parents in a devastating state of limbo. Years later, Elly is found and returns to the family. But she isn’t the girl they remember - is she an imposter, or is she their Elly, left scarred and distorted by unimaginable trauma?
The novella finds company among many other works of literary fiction examining the impact of a missing child. Like in Ian McEwan’s The Child In Time and Toni Morrison’s Beloved, the family faces the paradox of both the child’s absence and crushing presence within the home. Wetzel deftly portrays the way grief touches every corner of people’s lives, via a mother finding solace in her pill addiction and a father trying to claw his way back to intimacy with his wife.
Wetzel’s prose manages the extraordinary feat of being both sparse and poetic. Her narrators (rotating mostly between family members) are a matter of fact as they find heartbreak in small domestic details. The novel’s complete lack of dialogue allows insight into the isolating nature of grief, as family members living in the same house struggle to connect. Wetzel shifts unannounced between reality and fantasy, frequently pushing the reader to do a double-take and question what they’ve just been told.
Elly’s older sister, Ines, secures her place as the most intriguing narrator. She brings to life the electric tension of sibling relationships, seeking to role play it with others in the absence of her sister. Some of the book’s most impactful passages are Ines’ grisly imaginings of what may have happened to Elly, illustrative of the depths our minds will go to when left to fill in the blanks.
Sometimes there are flashes of crime fiction, but Wetzel toys with whether to give us any definite answers. Although frustratingly ambiguous at times, this allows the reader to grasp the heartbreak at hand; being a loved one of a missing person is an unrelenting fever dream. There may never be answers. “It’s like my sister is swallowed up by the ground,” Ines tells us. At times, Elly echoes the frustration at the centre of Denis Villeneuve’s 2013 film Prisoners (also about the search for missing children) in which a grieving mother announces, “No one took them. Nothing happened. They’re just gone.”
Elly is a quick read, digestible in a couple of hours. In some senses the choice of such a short length is a curious one; emotions are given space on the page, but significant plot points are introduced and then left unexplored to an unsatisfying degree. But the novella is genre-defying and gripping, and in particular, fans of true crime might enjoy its emotionally skilful interpretation of tragedy.
Elly is published by Scribe Publications
Release Date: 28 April 2020