Sunday Telegraphįrom its first sentence, Seethaler grips you with a quiet matter-of-factness as he delineates with a suitably spare beauty the life of woodsman Andreas Egger.Born in a small German mountain village, Andreas Egger led a modest life as a local mountaineer, and, according to his birth certificate, lived to be 79 years old. Charlotte Collins' translation is a great triumph. Times Literary Supplement It takes barely two hours to read it but would take a lifetime to forget. Seethaler renders a life at once ordinary and exquisite, exploring the vagaries of solitude with a gentle humility. This is a profound, wise and humane novel that no reader will forget. a gentle, tender work devoid of sentimentality yet so evocative and moving. It has been sensitively and astutely translated into English by Charlotte Collins. Now another of these special, calm narratives that penetrate the joy and grief, the tiny comforts of being alive and the experiences which shape an individual has arrived. It's an unremarked existence, told in simple prose, of a simple man that magically captures the universal in all our lives. Robert Seethaler's novel is, like its hero, short on words but in its 150 pages manages to do exactly what it says on the tin: embrace a whole life. But what is perhaps most remarkable about this remarkable novel is the way that it continually weaves past, present and future into a single fabric.
Seethaler's scenes of mountain life are realised with spare, almost surreally vivid images. Jim CraceĪgainst the backdrop of a literary world that often seems crowded with novels yelling "Look at me!", it's refreshing to read a story marked by quiet, concentrated attention. A Whole Life, for all its gentleness, is a very powerful book. It is at once heart-rending and heart-warming. Robert Seethaler's quietly mesmerizing novel - elemental in both tone and subject - shows what joy and nobility can be found in a life of hardship, patience and bereavement. It looks at the moments, big and small, that make us what we are. An exquisite novel about a simple life, it has already demonstrated its power to move thousands of readers with a message of solace and truth. He leaves his valley just once more, to fight in WWII - where he is taken prisoner in the Caucasus - and returns to find that modernity has reached his remote haven.Like John Williams' Stoner or Denis Johnson's Train Dreams, A Whole Life by Robert Seethaler is a tender book about finding dignity and beauty in solitude. When Marie dies in an avalanche, pregnant with their first child, Andreas' heart is broken. He is a man of very few words and so, when he falls in love with Marie, he doesn't ask for her hand in marriage, but instead has some of his friends light her name at dusk across the mountain.
for all its gentleness, a very powerful novel.' Jim Crace Andreas lives his whole life in the Austrian Alps, where he arrives as a young boy taken in by a farming family.
0 kommentar(er)
