Hiddensee: A Tale of the Once and Future Nutcracker

Today's read: Hiddensee: A Tale of the Once and Future Nutcraker by Gregory Maguire This novel is a retelling of The Nutcraker, but not the sugar-coated tale of pirouetting fairies, rather it is an homage to both the dark side of fairy tales and the bleakness of German Romanticism. Like his uber-successful Wicked, Maguire relates the story of a supporting character, in this case, Dirk Drosselmeier, the godfather who brings the heroic Nutcracker to the family. Drosselmeier wanders rather aimlessly & passively through a darkly fantastical life, unable to connect to others. He spends most of the tale adrift, a foundling abandoned in the woods by unknown parents, castout by his adopted parents, rejected even by death, searching for something he can't quite articulate or comprehend. Each person to whom he tries to fasten himself, eventually dies, leaving Drosselmeier wondering why it was he who got the second chance at life. Like the Nutcracker, his chest feels hollow, as though, having lost an eye to the enchanted forest, he's lost his heart as well. In his 2nd life Drosselmeier seems "severed from [his] true nature," his own past, and his memories, which seem more like dreams, unable to "grasp" "what divided... the things that could be seen versus the ones that could only be imagined." He becomes a conduit of the "old gods" that haunt him, gods that, through old stories, "steal secretly into our own times" gods "brought forward...to help." Yet this moment of purpose does not find him until he meets his goddaughter Klara toward the novel's end. "Without a memory, what does experience mean -- or matter?"