In Ierapetra, or His Sister’s Keeper (Canoe Tree Press, 247 pages), Joachim Frank’s splendid new novel, we find ourselves in the company of Reiner and his sister Monika. Reiner has two passions, science and writing. Monika has family and quilting. We accompany them on holiday to Island of Crete. We are immediately immersed in an archetype, innocents abroad in a challengingly unfamiliar culture, in this case two youths from the stern clime of northern Germany transported to the sunny sensuality of the Mediterranean.

The powerful narrative that pulls the reader relentlessly through the novel from beginning to end is familiar. What effect will culture shock have on our siblings while they are in Greece, and will it persist when they return home? Will their old commitments survive?

If on the sequestered island sun-burnished flesh is seductive, then there may be seductions. If a certain moral laxity colors the ambience of the island (a condition against which strictest barriers have been raised back home in Germany), then there may be tests of moral character. And so there are, both. Reiner, a straight arrow, may, under the tutelage of the delightfully bawdy Rosa, a sort of benign Carmen, learn to curve. Monika, an ingénue, may discover a genuine femininity in the arms of the bumptious but seductive Bernhard, a wannabe architect mucking about in Greece. Each in a characteristically different way will have to deal with deviance from the traditional values. Their trials are tense and moving.

So, character and plot give the novel a powerful base, but there are other uniquely valuable treasures. One is richly layered symbolism.

The scene is Ierapetra, which means sacred stone. Stones are strewn over the beaches of Ierapetra. They assume a darkly numinous quality in the mind of Reiner.

Some of the large stones in the sand were glowing like lanterns, as if a craftsman had hollowed them out and imbued them with perpetual fire. No, Reiner thought, this must have been the work of dozens of craftsmen, all working quietly and with precision as they followed a grand design. He wondered where they might live and what their stories were. He knew that he was supposed to be consoled by the burning stones, but instead the sight filled him with dread.

Later at Monika’s burial site Reiner remembers himself and his sister Monika as children pretending that the quartz stones they found in their yard in Germany were gold.

They would pass the time collecting goldstones—pebbles of quartz covered with shimmering fool’s gold. Each equipped with a glass jar, they used to crouch on their knees on the gravel in the backyard, looking for stones that glittered in the sun. Their knees would get hurt and even bloody in the process, but the pain was something he accepted as the price of the experience of doing something together; Reiner was sure his sister felt the same way, even though they never talked about it. Each successful pick would result in a tinkling sound as the stone landed in one of the jars. When a jar would start to fill up, the stones would land on the others with quiet thuds.

One can enter the novel by way of its dedication “In Memoriam Renate 1944 – 1998.” Was Reiner a dedicated keeper of Monika? Was Joachim Frank of Renate? This double signification of brother and sister brings us to Frank’s ingenious layering of presumed reality and fictive invention. Early in the novel, the author decides that telling the story in the first person will not work. He must distance himself from memories likely to prove unmanageable. Thus is born his avatar Reiner and the invented sister Monika. The artistic result is a kind of elegant scrim that most often foregrounds Reiner and Monika, but sometimes becomes almost transparent and reveals Joachim and Renate behind. The effect, powerful but difficult to describe, is an alternation of tones—elegiac, remorseful, foreboding, comical, contemplative—as the dominance of foreground or background at any moment engenders.

Is there a central theme that binds together the various riches of the novel? Early in the novel Frank, not yet creator of Reiner, is reminded of a flea circus he once watched in Copenhagen. What fascinates him is the fitful starts and stops of the fleas as they execute their acrobatics,

the counteracting forces that caused them to restart capriciously and at random. Until then, I think I had conceived the world as a giant Cartesian machine, where random lapses were inconceivable. At that moment, I realized these suspensions of the rule of determinism were in fact commonplace.

This is very close to the center of the novel. Are our lives just a random one thing after another? Or does what happens to us inevitably cause what we are? Or Heraclitus’ “character is destiny?” Or . . . what? We are confronted with a great mystery about life. And as long as it remains a mystery there will be a place for magical fictions like Ierapetra.

– Eugene K. Garber, author of Maison Cristina, 2021