This novel recounts the experiences of a mute girl, Adelheid Brunner, who spends much of her life in the Vienna Children’s Hospital. Though kids in Dr Asperger’s ward are informally categorised as Cabbages, Penguins, Sluts, or Autistic Psychopaths, Adelheid finds a safe place to continue her writing, map-drawing, and matchbox collecting, and ultimately becomes a valued worker.
Alice Jolley masterfully exploits the tension between Adelheid’s innocence and Nazism’s actual psychopathy to show how the sheer unbelievability of the latter’s extremism enabled its spread across Europe. Jolley thus helps us ‘imagine the unimaginable’ by putting us in Adelheid’s shoes: having become her, we turn our gaze away from endless monstrosities because we know that we are at perennial risk of being murdered for being a ‘useless Eater’.
Adelheid has always known she must perform a false self to navigate society. In the New World, such falsity becomes the norm. ‘The World stumbles on,’ she notes, ‘I make my Own World. You may say that these are lies. I no longer care. I must live and this is how it is done.’ Though the novel hints at the mass suffering of those who died, it foregrounds the mass moral injury of those who lived: no one can survive such atrocities and remain innocent.
As well as commemorating the past, The Matchbox Girl urgently warns us away from denying the growing fascism, militarism and ideological extremism of today. As Adelheid notes, if we can learn about ‘the banality of Evil’ from Nazism, we must also learn about evil’s counterforce: ‘the banality of Goodness’.
Reviewed by H C Gildfind
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Alice Jolly is a novelist and playwright. Her 2015 memoir, Dead Babies and Seaside Towns, won the Pen Ackerley Prize, and one of her short stories won the 2014 V S Pritchett Memorial Prize, awarded by The Royal Society of Literature. She has also published two other novels and four of her plays have been produced by the professional company of the Everyman Theatre in Cheltenham. She teaches creative writing at Oxford University.
Her novel Mary Ann Sate, Imbecile was a Walter Scott Prize recommended novel for 2109, and was longlisted for the Ondaatje Prize awarded by the Royal Society of Literature and was runner up for the £30,000 Rathbones Folio Prize. In 2021 she was received an O. Henry Award for her short story ‘From Far Around They Saw Us Burn.’
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