"Rabbit of the Netherworld" is a unique and often compelling memoir, a fragmentary poetic recreation of the author's wartime childhood and its many painful events. A lonely girl, traumatized by air raids, relocation to the countryside and one loss after another, searches for connection and comfort amid the ruins. She finds it mainly in spirits from the netherworld -- a parade of dead aunts and uncles, and an odd rabbit that keeps her company on moonlit nights.
The narrative charts the child's loss of innocence and follows the author, as an adult, on her journey to come to terms with her painful past. It begins in 1989, when the narrator takes a train and goes down, almost mythically "through the looking glass," back in time to the house where she grew up.
Raised in poverty by a single father whose love of math is more easily expressed than his love of his daughter, during the air raids she suffers another kind of pain -- rejection, hurt and anger at her father's calculated approach to life through equations that don't factor in the vicissitudes of the heart. When mother leaves them for her lover, she asks, "Father, wasn't there a mathematical expression that would keep Mother's heart moored to yours?"