This novel is in five parts: ‘The Eye/I or A Story to Love her’, ‘Acrobat’, ‘The Dead’, ‘The Suitor’ and ‘The Poet’, each written in a different style. While each part is self-contained, together they form a narrative whole, which is developed around the idea that writing stories about our ancestors is one way of discovering or fashioning our identity.

‘The Eye/I’ is told by an unnamed narrator to whom a woman, ‘she’, tells the story of her childhood and adolescence. The woman’s voice is repetitive and obsessional, focused around a number of episodes from her past that have had a lasting effect on her. At the time of telling the story, she appears to be near the end of her life, resigned to the fact that she is a failure.

‘The Acrobat’ is a sequence of prose poems written in the style of magic realism. Several voices contribute to a story of Maria, the grandmother of the female protagonist from the first section, the grandmother who, at the age of sixteen, had a life-changing experience when she met a circus performer who could fly and who took her on a nocturnal flight above the Earth. She wondered how, despite the wind, his top hat remained in place.

The female protagonist of the first section also narrates ‘The Dead’; here she describes the secret life of a grandfather she never knew and who, she claims, did not die in the WWII as officially recorded, but came back and reinvented himself. He relinquished his pre-war life, his name and his family, but later exercised a long-distance influence on his grown-up daughter, her husband and children by sending them parcels of carefully chosen books.

‘The Suitor’ is a first-person narrative told by Mr Gustav Otto Wagner, an older man who hoped to marry Maria but was ultimately turned down.

In the final section, ‘The Poet’, the “she” of ‘The Eye/I’, looks at four family photographs and from them pieces together the story of her other grandfather, the husband of Maria. Here, her tone is analytical and the style less intimate than in the rest of the text.

The novel comprises stories of real people in an un-named country in central Europe, with factual and imagined events woven together to form a biography of sorts. 

From reviews of Only A Lodger . . . And Hardly That

https://www.newstatesman.com/culture/books/2021/01/ns-recommends-new-books-richard-flanagan-brian-christian-and-vesna-main

https://www.litromagazine.com/literature/book-reviewonly-a-lodger-and-hardly-that-by-vesna-main/