Book Report--The Comfort Bird

I don't know that I've ever read a book quite like The Comfort Bird. At times, it's a memoir. Hylke Speerstra, one of Friesland's leading writers, quotes from his own interviews with the central characters, who willingly reminisced with him about the war years. But The Comfort Bird is not memoir. 

The considerable research Speerstra does throughout the story makes the book feel, at times, like researched journalism. He deduces motivations by explaining things like doomed economic markets; he draws generalization about the characters on the basis of what entire nations were suffering. The American Dust Bowl requires background he willingly gives to his Frisian readers. At times, The Comfort Bird feels like history.

Then again, when he pulls the narration close to what is happening inside his characters' heads, when the story reveals what Speerstra could only have imagined, the book feels like fiction. But there's so much history, so much reminiscence that The Comfort Bird is certainly not a novel.

It's just a story, a very real story that concerns very real characters. It's reality television maybe, stuck between the covers of a book. The story it tells is the story he somehow discovered: two men at war who somehow discover their own familial pasts were rooted in a small town in Friesland, the Netherlands, where their grandparents were neighbors. 

One is an American, whose extraordinary war experience includes participation in just about every major step of the Allied front on the long and bloody march to Berlin--from the beach at Normandy to the frozen horrors of the Bulge to first steps into the horror of a Nazi camp full of walking dead. Nanning Hiemstra himself cannot believe that he walked away from all that death when so many did not. 

At the turn of the 20th century, before his grandmother, dirt poor, finally got her way and left the Netherlands for America with her family, before that she'd lived in a town where another hard luck family's fortunes turned in a wholly different direction. Driven just as powerfully by poverty rooted in the same cultural predicaments, Johannes Boorsma left Friesland to milk German cows. When the war begins, he sides with the Dutch Nazis, the National Socialists.

The story line is set clearly early on. These two are going to reunite. But reunite isn't the right word because they never knew each other. They became soldiers thousands of miles apart and for completely different reasons, never saw each other's face before the moment, after the war, when they met, not as friends but, in truth, as enemies. The Comfort Bird is most certainly a war story; the two of them participate in action from France to Russia. 

But even the war plays second fiddle to the moment the two come to realize who they are, children of families once upon a time so very close. Serendipity is a darling word, but not much more substantive than a word luck. Just plain happenstance. "Small world!" we say when such things happen.

There's comfort there too, isn't there? Someone sits down next to you and the two of you somehow discover that somewhere along the line your daughter and his son had the same high school teacher. Such moments make us smile by making an otherwise complex world feel manageable. 

The Comfort Bird answers a human need to have our lives somehow end where they began, a loop, a circle, a whole--what Native people consider the great circle of being. We like completeness in any form, even when it's arrived at in a pattern that feels entirely serendipitous. 

My dad used to tell me, straight-faced, that Christians should never really use the word luck because there simply is no such thing in a world ruled by a sovereign God. It gave him comfort to believe that, even in the dark moments when a sovereign God seems to have given up his reign to evil.

The Comfort Bird manages to bring its own species of comfort to a reader, especially those who share much of the story it offers. I loved the book--found it confusing at times, but loved it. 

There's no end to the suffering in the war stories of these two men. The real burden of The Comfort Bird is the Second World War. But it's also much more than a war story. It's a story of a small town in hard times, of the necessary perils of immigration, of a number of social movements so compelling they can't be easily escaped. 

What drew Hylke Speerstra to research and write this story is nothing more or less than the sheer, shocking beauty of its unlikely end, when two scarred veterans, just for a moment, realized who they are and who they've been.  
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The Comfort Bird was translated from the Frisian language into English by Henry Baron, emeritus professor of English at Calvin College.