After reading the first paragraph of janniethestrange’s review of Our Endless Numbered Days, I went right on over to Amazon and bought it. I didn’t even finish the review, since I wanted to go in with only the roughest idea of the plot. And I’m glad I did!
The plot is well-told, but more than the plot, I loved the mood of the book. We get a creepy sense of foreboding from the narration, which is told in a sort of fog of youth, that her survivalist father, James, and pianist mother, Ute, have their differences. There’s a strange man, Oliver, who hangs around their London house a lot, and our protagonist Peggy just doesn’t quite trust him. James is forever drilling Peggy on survivalist strategies and drills. It’s weird, but a lot of families are weird, right?
And one day after Ute leaves for a few weeks, James takes Peggy on a “holiday” to a remote cabin in Germany. The holiday lasts nine years.
They spend those years living in Die Hutte, a remote wooden cabin in a densely wooded forest. James tells Peggy that the rest of the world is dead–they are the only two who survived. They live off the land and survive 9 brutal winters until Peggy (not a spoiler) eventually finds her way back to civilization.
The descriptions of the scenery is enchanting and, to Fuller’s great credit, never boring, as sometimes nature scenes can sometimes be. The woods are always a little bit creepy to the reader (not in small part due to her father’s persistent creepiness) but as Peggy grows up in them and makes them her own, the wilderness becomes her life…but then, of course, she grows up a little but and, as one does, begins to question her father’s role in her life, his judgement, his preoccupations. Her world starts to unravel, or come together, depending on how you look at it.
This is a story about survival–in the wilderness, and elsewhere in our lives–and it’s a story about traumatic relationships. It’s a story about the stories we tell ourselves to justify our own decisions, whether mundane or catastrophic. And it’s a story about how we cope with other people’s decisions that affect our lives.
Rating: 4/5. What really made the novel a can’t-put-down for me was Peggy’s voice, which is believably naive, and terrifically consistent–the reader always has enough information to draw both solid conclusions and inferences about the characters, but we also always feel like there’s something lurking. Peggy hasn’t told us everything, after all. How could she?
