The novels of the young Austrian writer, Erich Hackl, use individual characters to examine themes from recent history. He appears particularly interested in the struggles of the 1930s, and his books reveal a sympathy for the downtrodden and those committed to the fight against bourgeois conventionality.

‘One day Aurora Rodríguez was compelled to kill her daughter’, is the opening sentence, and the novel looks back over her life and that of her daughter in order to reveal ‘Aurora’s motive’. Born in pre-World War One Spain, Aurora is an unconventional woman. She suffered the harsh Spanish upbringing of the time, tempered by her close relationship with her father, a sensitive but ineffective idealist with sympathy for ‘simple folk’, but who has a low opinion of women. After the death of his wife, Aurora becomes his conversation partner, reads his library, and develops advanced ideas. The day she reaches legal maturity she advertises for a man to father her child, whom she brings up independently, according to her own ideas rather than convention.

The child, Hildegart, responds to her mother’s emphasis on healthy, free physical development, and the encouragement of her intellectual and emotional faculties. She is a prodigy who is far in advance of her age in all things (except perhaps socially; her mother does not let her play with other children because ‘wrong upbringing is contagious’). At thirteen she goes to the university to study constitutional law, and at seventeen she is lecturing to socialist meetings and writing articles for left-wing newspapers.

Aurora feels she is beginning to lose Hildegart to her political activities and her ideological friends, and also suspects she is tempted to give in to the ‘flesh’. Her daughter asserts her independence and accepts a job working with Havelock Ellis (turn of the century writer and sexologist), arranged by H.G.Wells. Then, in a sudden volte face, she returns to her mother and pleads for help to stop her ‘going off the straight and narrow’, asking Aurora to kill her.

Hildegart, quotations from whose writings on the situation of women punctuate the text, is a kind of nun of secular enlightenment. Her upbringing has fostered a sense of vocation which is so ingrained that when she feels she may not be strong enough to maintain it in the face of the world she chooses to escape rather than succumb.

Hackl’s sober but not humourless narration ensures that the story of Aurora and her daughter, which, with its rigidly uncompromising rejection of convention, might easily descend to the comic grotesque, engages both the readers’ sympathy and their understanding. In answering the question of Aurora’s motive, he raises many more about the nature of society.

‘Look, the maid said, how funny, the bees are flying round.

They’re working, Hildegart answered. They’re bringing the male pollen to the stigma. Then a tube goes down to the egg and then it’s fertilized.

You certainly know a lot.

I know a lot more.

Julia Sanz was only half listening. She was watching the photographer in front of them, who was leisurely unpacking his tripod and setting up his box camera...

Why is that man staring at you? Hildegart asked.

Maybe he likes me.

Maybe he wants to fertilize you, the little girl said.

Not so loud.

Why are you turning red?

I’m not turning red.

Yes you are.

Julia tried to change the subject. I’ve never been photographed.

But fertilizing people is different from fertilizing plants.

Hildegart! Be quiet. The man. He can hear us.

He has a penis, Hildegart said, and he sticks it in your vagina. And then semen comes out and fertilizes an egg and then a child begins to grow in your stomach.» p55