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WORK TITLE: A Whole Life
WORK NOTES: trans by Charlotte Collins
PSEUDONYM(S):
BIRTHDATE: 8/7/1966
WEBSITE:
CITY: Berlin
STATE:
COUNTRY: Germany
NATIONALITY:
LOC & Wikipedia say born 1966; IMDB says 1968 * http://www.picador.com/authors/robert-seethaler * http://www.imdb.com/name/nm1210776/ * http://www.irishtimes.com/culture/books/a-whole-life-by-robert-seethaler-one-man-endures-one-day-at-a-time-1.2394527 * http://www.startribune.com/reviews-a-whole-life-by-robert-seethaler-and-all-on-one-plate-by-solveig-brown/392930301/
RESEARCHER NOTES:
PERSONAL
Born August 7, 1966, in Vienna, Austria.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Writer and actor.
WRITINGS
SIDELIGHTS
A Whole Life
Robert Seethaler is an Austrian novelist and actor who lives in Germany. His first book in English translation, A Whole Life, details the life of Andreas Egger. The boy arrives in an unnamed alpine village after his mother dies in 1902, and he is raised by his abusive uncle. When Andreas finally gets older, he stands up to his uncle and grows up to become a loving husband and father. Although he has a limp, Andreas finds a good job clearing trees for a local cable car company. The narrative stretches into the 1950s, following Andreas as he is swept through the tides of both world wars. As the author explained in a New York Times Online interview with Stephen Heyman, “I invented all the places in the book, and all the place names. In a way, they’re mythical places. This life, or something very like it, could have been lived anywhere at any time. But of course I do have memories, or emotional memories, of my childhood experiences in the mountains. The wonderful silence of the snow; and also the dangers of the mountains themselves—you don’t forget things like that.”
A Publishers Weekly contributor stated: “Not always successfully, Seethaler seeks to avoid sentimentality.” Nevertheless, the contributor added, “readers will discover in his contained prose a vehicle for keen insight and observation.” Eileen Battersby, writing on the Irish Times Online, was even more positive, asserting that the novel’s “power rests in its candid simplicity. A Whole Life has the mood of an Alistair MacLeod story and will resonate with Irish readers for its physical evocation of the remote mountain village as well as for its understated melancholy.” Battersby added: “Seethaler never reduces Andreas to a mere victim. Instead, he is a survivor whose personality evolves throughout the narrative as experiences consolidate his response to existence. It is his story, yet A Whole Life is also a study of change and the impact of progress upon a traditional way of life.”
Music and Literature Web site correspondent Anne Posten praised the novel as well, asserting: “A Whole Life is structured so that reflection and commentary, which often coincide with episodes told out of strict chronology, become more frequent as the book draws to its conclusion. This is one of the excellent tricks of Seethaler’s pacing: the satisfying hints of direction and meaning—always filtered through Egger’s simple perception, and therefore understated—are delivered at the point where it becomes clear to the reader that there will be little more to uncover, narratively at least, about the path of his life.” Posted went on to conclude that “Seethaler ultimately succeeds in fixing something that is very difficult to grasp, particularly in literature, where the scrutiny on ‘meaning’ is particularly intense: life as worthy and precious regardless of the content it is filled with. This is what life is, the book seems to say: it is simply living, breathing, eating, moving—the things that we all share and never stop doing until the day we die.” Offering further applause in his Booklist assessment, Jonathan Fuller announced: “Seethaler’s understated tale is a reminder that joy can be found in daily toils and simple pleasures.”
The Tobacconist
Seethaler’s next novel in English translation, The Tobacconist, begins in 1937. It follows seventeen-year-old Franz Huchel as he heads from his tiny village to take a job in Vienna. The boy will serve as an apprentice to a local tobacconist, and his job shelters him from the growing Nazi presence. The shop is an intellectual haven where discussions of Sigmund Freud take precedence. As Franz grows into his intellectual wakening, the growing threat of the Nazis becomes increasingly disconcerting. As the boy explores ideas he begins to recognize his own ideals, and these ideals inevitably lead Franz to act, to resist the evil flourishing around him.
Like its predecessor, The Tobacconist fared well with critics, and a London Observer Online reporter found that “Seethaler blends tragedy and whimsy to create a bittersweet picture of youthful ideals.” An online Scotsman reviewer conceded: “Never mind whether you fully understand the politics of a situation, Seethaler seems to be saying, if your instincts tell you something is unjust, act on them. All of which makes The Tobacconist essential reading for the early years of the 21st century.” Adrian Turpin, writing in the Financial Times Online, offered further applause declaring: “Does The Tobacconist share the romantic chutzpah, the theatricality of A Whole Life? Does it feel, like that slender volume, that it has been hewn out of a single piece of stone? Is it as instantly readable? No, on all three counts. It’s uneven in tone, hesitant, a bit sprawly. But in some ways it feels like a more honest, less sentimental piece of work, dispensing with certainties to embrace shades of moral grey.”
BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
Booklist, September 1, 2016, Jonathan Fullmer, review of A Whole Life, p. 49.
Publishers Weekly, July 4, 2016, review of A Whole Life, p. 38.
ONLINE
Financial Times Online, https://www.ft.com/ (December 9, 2016), Adrian Turpin, review of The Tobacconist.
Irish Times, http://www.irishtimes.com/ (October 17, 2015), Eileen Battersby, review of A Whole Life.
London Observer Online, https://www.theguardian.com/ (November 20, 2016), review of The Tobacconist.
Minneapolis Star Tribune Online, http://www.startribune.com/ (September 12, 2016), review of A Whole Life.
Music and Literature, http://www.musicandliterature.org/ (October 4, 2016), Anne Posten, review of A Whole Life.
New York Times Online, https://www.nytimes.com (August 24, 2016), Stephen Hayman, author interview.
Scotsman, http://www.scotsman.com/ (October 11, 2016), review of The Tobacconist.
Sydney Morning Herald, http://www.smh.com.au/ (June 3 2016), review of A Whole Life.*
LC control no.: no2006070485
Descriptive conventions:
rda
LC classification: PT2721.E48
Personal name heading:
Seethaler, Robert, 1966-
Found in: Die Biene und der Kurt, c2006: t.p. (Robert Seethaler) bk.
jkt. (b. 1966 in Vienna)
A whole life, 2016: ECIP t.p. (Robert Seethaler) data view
(b. 8/7/1966 in Vienna; is the author of four previous
novels; he also works as an actor, most recently in
Paolo Sorrentino's La Grande Bellezza; he lives in
Berlin)
================================================================================
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Questions? Contact: ils@loc.gov
Robert Seethaler is an Austrian living in Berlin. He is the bestselling author of four novels, including The Tobacconist, which has sold more than 200,000 copies in Germany, and A Whole Life, which has sold more than 100,000 copies in Germany. He also works as an actor, most recently in Paolo Sorrentino's Youth.
In German.
Robert Seethaler Talks About His New Book, Writing and Acting
By STEPHEN HEYMANAUG. 24, 2016
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Robert Seethaler Credit Urban Zintel
In Paolo Sorrentino’s recent movie “Youth,” Robert Seethaler had a brief but memorable turn playing a big-bearded mountain climbing instructor who falls hard for Rachel Weisz. While the Austrian-born Berliner may moonlight as a European character actor, he spends most of his time writing. Mr. Seethaler’s latest book, “A Whole Life” (Ein ganzes Leben) was a huge bestseller in Germany. Its English translation (by Charlotte Collins), short-listed for the Man Booker International Prize, comes out next month in the United States via Farrar, Straus and Giroux. At 150 pages, the story is something like a heroic saga in miniature, recounting the life of a plainspoken farmhand whose pastoral solitude in the Austrian Alps is disrupted by the arrival of war, tourism and industry. The book has been compared to a slew of famous works from the “Into Their Labours” novels of John Berger to the late-blooming classic “Stoner” by John Williams. The following is an edited transcript of an interview with Mr. Seethaler, which was translated from the German by Ms. Collins.
Q. How did you wind up playing an alpine instructor in Mr. Sorrentino’s latest film “Youth”?
A. Sorrentino invited me to Italy for a casting. At first I didn’t want to go because I didn’t want to travel all the way to Rome. Then I saw “La Grande Bellezza” — Sorrentino’s previous film, which won an Oscar — and I realized: This man makes great classical cinema! And that was what happened. My character, Luca Moroder, is a good mountaineer, but he doesn’t have a clue about women. It’s a little story of love at first sight. And of course it was great dangling on a rope over an abyss with Rachel Weisz.
Your new novella, “A Whole Life,” is also set in the mountains, in this case the Austrian Alps . Was the village and the landscape based on places that you knew firsthand?
I invented all the places in the book, and all the place names. In a way, they’re mythical places. This life, or something very like it, could have been lived anywhere at any time. But of course I do have memories, or emotional memories, of my childhood experiences in the mountains. The wonderful silence of the snow; and also the dangers of the mountains themselves — you don’t forget things like that. Nature can often be enjoyed, but sometimes you have to endure it, too. It can fill you with dread. There’s more to it than just its beauty; it’s also inconceivable and frightening.
Many readers have discussed the contrast between the book’s imposing title and its short length. Was it a challenge to squeeze such an extraordinary life story into such a small space?
It has nothing to do with squeezing, more with carving out. Where do you begin? What do you select? What do you leave out? In the end it all revolves around the question: What are the things that go to make up such a life? It’s like carving wood or sculpting stone. You don’t get many chances. Every cut, every blow of the chisel has to sit right. In a way I was carving Andreas Egger, the book’s central character, out of my heart. Every life, when you look back on it, reduces itself to a few moments. The moments are what stay with us.
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“A Whole Life” is an international best seller. Do you have any theories about why this story has resonated so widely?
I don’t have any theories. I can’t think about things like that. I just wanted to tell the story of a simple man. Of course I’m pleased that the book has touched such an incredible number of people. But there’s no intention behind it. I believe many people find in it something like consolation.
Is there a lot of crossover and shared themes between your acting and writing careers? Or do you consider them very separate?
I grew up with a severe visual impairment and went to a school for the blind in Vienna. As a child I always lived in my own little world. That’s probably why I prefer writing. It’s more of an internalization. With acting you have to externalize, or enlarge the internalizations, make them visible. That was never really my strong point. Whenever I performed in the theater I always felt so ashamed I just wanted the boards to swallow me up. It’s all right with film; the camera’s silent discretion protects me.
Can you tell me a bit about your current projects — literary, cinematic or otherwise?
I’m writing a novel about a small town — particularly its graveyard. It’s a hell of a job. After this I’ll probably need to rest for a few years and laugh as much as possible.
A Whole Life
Jonathan Fullmer
113.1 (Sept. 1, 2016): p49.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2016 American Library Association
http://www.ala.org/ala/aboutala/offices/publishing/booklist_publications/booklist/booklist.cfm
A Whole Life. By Robert Seethaler. Tr. by Charlotte Collins. Sept. 2016.160p. Farrar, $23 (9780374289867).
Austrian-born actor and novelist Seethaler delivers a slender, meditative novel about nature, love, and simple living. Born around the dawn of the twentieth century, Andreas Egger has spent his entire life in a rural, alpine village, where he roams the mountains. Forced to live with an abusive relative as a child, Egger has had a limp ever since and now rarely speaks. Though most people would consider his hobbling a handicap, ever-resilient and optimistic Egger uses it as an advantage as he traverses the uneven, snowy mountain landscape. He has embraced a life of struggle, even building a tiny home on a craggy plot of land high above the village. When at last he falls in love and takes up work clearing trees for a new cable car, his perception of the mountain begins to change, and survival takes on a new meaning as the reality of war sweeps in. A tender and moving look at the human capacity for adaptation, Seethaler's understated tale is a reminder that joy can be found in daily toils and simple pleasures.--Jonathan Fullmer
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Fullmer, Jonathan. "A Whole Life." Booklist, 1 Sept. 2016, p. 49. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA463755114&it=r&asid=5a024d96ece91ce7bb75bc6247c3faaf. Accessed 1 Mar. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A463755114
A Whole Life
263.27 (July 4, 2016): p38.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2016 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
A Whole Life
Robert Seethaler, trans. from the German by Charlotte Collins. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, $23 (160p) ISBN 978-0-374-28986-7
The life chronicled in Seethaler's poignant novel is, at first glance, unremarkable: Andreas Egger begins and ends his life in an Alpine valley village, where he arrives after his mother's death in 1902, and to which he returns in 1951, after years as a POW in Russia. Egger, however, contains multitudes: subjected to childhood beatings that leave him with a permanent limp, he stands up to his abusive uncle and goes on to become an expert cable-car company employee, as well as a devoted husband and father. But the mountainous land he loves--and through which, in his middle age, he leads groups of hiking tourists--is far from serene. The titanic forces of nature and politics determine Egger's arduous course through the 20th century. Not always successfully, Seethaler seeks to avoid sentimentality. Readers will discover in his contained prose a vehicle for keen insight and observation: Egger, touched for the first time by his future wife, experiences "a very subtle pain ... more profound than any [he] had encountered," and later, watching the Moon landing with his neighbors in their new parish hall, he feels "mysteriously close and connected to the villagers down here on the darkened Earth." Nearing his end, Egger "couldn't remember where he had come from, and ultimately he didn't know where he would go. But he could look back without regret ... with a full-throated laugh and utter amazement." (Sept.)
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"A Whole Life." Publishers Weekly, 4 July 2016, p. 38+. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA457302855&it=r&asid=48a151853eba9b3d36c4a4c96c4b0f0e. Accessed 1 Mar. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A457302855
A Whole Life by Robert Seethaler: one man endures, one day at a time
This wise German novel, set over decades in a remote mountain village, is tender, evocative but never sentimental, writes Eileen Battersby
Eileen Battersby
Sat, Oct 17, 2015, 00:38
First published:
Sat, Oct 17, 2015, 00:38
Book Title:
A Whole Life
ISBN-13:
978-1447283904
Author:
Robert Seethaler, translated by Charlotte Collins
Publisher:
Picador
Guideline Price:
£8.99
Fifty years ago an American writer published a tender, quiet novel that caused barely a ripple. Yet readers loved Stoner and it would become a book that lives through the insistence of word of mouth. Some time later, in 1973, Stoner was published in the UK, again without fanfare. And yet again, the reaction was positive, if muted.
Almost 30 years would pass before a publisher decided to reissue it. In order to secure the wider reverence, the support of a master was sought. John McGahern lovingly championed Stoner and wrote an introductory essay of rare critical intuition and insight.
Since then, John Williams’s subtle account of a farmer’s unassuming son who attends a midwestern college to study agriculture, only to discover literature and instead become a university lecturer, continues to beguile readers across the world. Williams was a career academic and Stoner was his third of four novels. He died in 1994
Rosita Boland (third from right) with some of the interviewees from ‘Generations: Ten Decades of Irish Life’ at the launch of the book. Photograph: Dave Meehan/The Irish TimesGenerations: Ten Decades of Irish Life, by Rosita Boland: the people speak
John Boyne: his novels for children can be grouped – there is a boy, he is around eight or nine years old, or will be at some point in the book, and there will be a darkness of some kindThe Boy at the Top of the Mountain, by John Boyne: Hitler’s right-hand boy
A British army first World War recruiting poster appeals to Irishmen’s Catholic sensibilitiesHeroes or Traitors? Experiences of Southern Irish Soldiers returning from the Great War
They All Love Jack review: a ripping yarn
Colum McCann: an honest writer. Photograph: Cyril Byrne Thirteen Ways of Looking by Colum McCann: reality trumps invention
Hype dictates nowadays, meaning calm, understated novels are often overlooked. Yet subtle mood-fictions such as Stoner create a hunger for similar, thoughtful works. William Maxwell’s So Long, See You Tomorrow (1981), a heartbreaking, confessional story about how a boyhood moment of weakness earns the narrator a lifelong guilt over his cowardly act of betrayal, is another understated masterwork. So, too, is Paul Harding’s more recent Pulitzer Prize-winning Tinkers (2009), in which an old man lies dying as his confused memories coalesce into a vivid pageant in his mind.
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 without any marketing hysteria, though it has been a bestseller in Europe.
Vienna-born actor and writer Robert Seethaler grew up in Germany and moved to Berlin in 1998. A Whole Life, his disciplined fifth novel, is as haunting and as spare as Stoner. It has been sensitively and astutely translated into English by Charlotte Collins and published within a year of its German publication.
The speed is not surprising, and it is wonderful to see a gentle, tender work devoid of sentimentality yet so evocative and moving being presented to an international readership.
Yet again its power rests in its candid simplicity. A Whole Life has the mood of an Alistair MacLeod story and will resonate with Irish readers for its physical evocation of the remote mountain village as well as for its understated melancholy, which is reminiscent of Sam Hanna Bell’s classic December Bride (1951).
A deliberate life
Andreas Egger is a solemn man of few words but deep, complex feeling that he seldom articulates. He believes in action over rhetoric. Work is the language he best understands. As a child he “had never shouted or cheered. He didn’t even really talk until his first year at school.”
Andreas has his reasons. In 1902, when he was about four, he arrives in the mountain village where he will spend his life and is taken in by a relative: a gruff, brutal farmer whose motivation for claiming the only child of a disgraced sister-in-law is the few bank notes in a leather pouch hanging around the youngster’s neck.
The farmer is a demented zealot, given to inflicting routine beatings for the most minor offence, such as spilling milk or stuttering at prayers. Little Andreas never cries, and this silence incited the farmer to further frenzy. During one such beating when the boy is eight, his thigh is badly fractured. Not even the gifted local bonesetter can repair it fully, leaving Andreas with a limp.
But Andreas grows strong, stronger than anyone else in the village. For all his awkwardness and slowness of speech, he possesses immense physical strength. In a remarkable sequence. the farmer is preparing to thrash him for dropping a bowl of soup. Andreas, by now 18, finally refuses to be beaten: “If you hit me, I’ll kill you,” he says. The farmer is shocked, then orders the boy to leave.
Events are reported calmly, as if the author has been told the story and is simply passing on the details. Andreas may have a simple existence, yet there are moments of intense drama. As a grown man he attempts to rescue the local goatherd. Somehow the dying man, having spoken to Andreas about death in the form of the Cold Lady, leaps to his feet, races off and disappears in the snow.
Earlier, when he is small, Andreas watches as the cart carrying the body of the farmer’s mother-in-law, the only family member who had been kind to him, lurches sideways on the road, and the dead woman’s arm slides out of the coffin and into view.
Illuminated love
Progress arrives in the valley in the form of a cable car company, and Andreas joins the workforce. When he finally summons the confidence to propose marriage to Marie, a woman who works hard and has callused hands to prove it, his co-workers collaborate to help him illuminate his love to her through words spelt out in letters of fire on the mountain side.
The towering mountains are eerie and avalanches are a reality. One night Andreas is woken by a sound: “it was no more than an intimation, a soft whisper stealing around the walls . . . Black clouds were racing across the night sky, a pale, shapeless moon flickering between them.”
As the landscape begins to move, Andreas is caught up by the rampaging snow and pushed along as if by a great wave. The subsequent tragedy changes everything for him.
Surviving, adapting
War intervenes. Andreas is initially rejected as a volunteer, but he is eventually conscripted and sent to the Eastern Front. Captured, he is sent to a work camp and remains there for eight years. Following his return to the village, he adapts to the ongoing changes. All the while the world moves on, and Andreas recalls having “seen a couple of men walk about on the moon.”
Age catches up on him but he endures in his stoic, determined way. His response to the chance of a late intimacy is exquisitely handled by Seethaler. Andreas always adapts to change and sets up as a walking guide. He watches as his clients, the new breed of tourist, react to the very landscape within which he has lived and laboured.
Seethaler never reduces Andreas to a mere victim. Instead, he is a survivor whose personality evolves throughout the narrative as experiences consolidate his response to existence. It is his story, yet A Whole Life is also a study of change and the impact of progress upon a traditional way of life. There are echoes of John Berger’s Into Their Labours trilogy.
Months before he dies, he takes a bus trip out of the village. When asked where he wants to go, he replies: “I don’t know . . . I simply don’t know.” Andreas comes to be seen as eccentric, but he knows otherwise. He is sustained by the memory of the love he once experienced.
No praise is too high for A Whole Life. Its daunting beauty lingers. This is a profound, wise and humane novel that no reader will forget.
Eileen Battersby is literary correspondent
"A Whole Life" by RObert Seethaler
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A Whole Life
By Robert Seethaler, translated from the German by Charlotte Collins. (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 151 pages, $23.)
This sparse, beautiful novel by Berlin author and actor Robert Seethaler was a bestseller in Germany when it was released in 2014, and the love is likely to spread with this month’s release of Charlotte Collins’ lovely English translation.
The story’s power lies in its raw simplicity. It tracks, from childhood to death, one Andreas Egger, a humble, impoverished, oft abused, barely literate laborer who, except for a harrowing stint as a German soldier and POW during World War II, is rooted for nearly eight decades in a remote mountain town. His life, which plays out in the shadow of great mountains, horrific human history and remarkable technological change, is utterly ordinary, and when he dies, few notice, much less mourn — but because of how reverently his story is rendered, readers will find him unforgettable.
Like most lives, Egger’s brings joy, despair, love, loss, success and failure. The novel’s respectful, concise accounting of its key moments illuminates its beauty and meaning, and reminds us that each life, no matter how long or brief, is a whole and rounded story, worthy of our attention and respect. A monumental book that can be read in a single sitting.
PAMELA MILLER
Robert Seethaler’s
A Whole Life
October 4, 2016
by Anne Posten
A Whole Life by Robert Seethaler tr. Charlotte Collins (Picador UK, Oct. 2015; FSG, Sept. 2016) Reviewed by Anne Posten
A Whole Life
by Robert Seethaler
tr. Charlotte Collins
(Picador UK, Oct. 2015; FSG, Sept. 2016)
Reviewed by Anne Posten
Apparently, if we are to believe the venerable Swiss newspaper Neue Zürcher Zeitung, Robert Seethaler’s slim latest work, A Whole Life, is “a novel for sadists.” Such a proclamation seems an extreme one for a book whose diminutive size and unpretentious premise fairly trumpet harmlessness. Nor does the title belie the content. A Whole Life is in fact just that: a compressed chronicle of one man’s entire life, from birth (nearly) to death. The facts that the man in question is a resident of a tiny Austrian alpine town, and that his life spans the first three tumultuous quarters of the twentieth century do not at first glance contradict the assumption that the reader will find little fodder here for her darker impulses. Or perhaps they do. What is it, really, that a reader looks for from an encounter with a foreign life, whether fictional or real? What impulses, dark or ennobling, attract us to a work of literature in the first place?
The novel’s first scene, which appears, as do occasional other episodes, outside the generally steady chronology of protagonist Andreas Egger’s life, involves an encounter with death. The tour-de force first sentence offers readers perhaps the first clue to the novel’s tone:
On a February morning in the year 1933 Andreas Egger lifted the dying goatherd Johannes Kalischka, known to all the valley dwellers as Horned Hannes, off his sodden and rather sour-smelling pallet to carry him down to the village along the three-kilometer mountain path that lay buried beneath a thick layer of snow.
Though its construction recalls the beginning of Kafka’s Metamorphosis (an echo brilliantly replicated by Charlotte Collins’ marvelously confident translation), it is rather the choice of words, heavy with filth and mortality, that signals the book’s interests as being far from pastoral in any idealized sense. Something close to a moral is also delivered in this first section—a sound authorial choice, as the lesson, if that is what it is, then hovers over the reading rather than end-stopping it. As the pair descends the mountain, the goatherd relates his understanding of death to Egger, now in his late thirties, thus:
People say death brings forth new life, but people are stupider than the stupidest nanny goat. I say death brings forth nothing at all! Death is the Cold Lady . . . She walks on the mountain and steals through the valley. She comes when she wants and takes what she needs. She has no face and no voice . . . She seizes you as she passes and takes you with her and sticks you in some hole. And in the last patch of sky you see before they finally shovel the earth in over you she reappears and breathes on you. And all that’s left for you then is darkness. And the cold.
Egger, standing in for the reader, can only reply drily, “Jesus. That’s bad.”
Indeed, Egger’s simple life contains more that a modern reader, particularly an American one—to whom even the word “village” sounds quaint and undeniably European—would recognize as pain, or at best drudgery, than joy: his childhood mostly a series of beatings at the hand of the distant relative who is his guardian, ultimately resulting in a lifelong limp; his nascent marriage tragically ended by an avalanche; subsequent dogged celibacy; dangerous, back-breaking work for a company that brings progress to the farthest reaches of the alps by erecting cable cars; long imprisonment at the hand of the Russians in World War II; quiet loneliness on his return home to a village transformed by tourism and the steady onward march of modernity. Is it the romance of the unfamiliar, the pain of a distant and forgotten world, which we dip into briefly as voyeurs rather than as participants, that is attractive in this book?
There is something to be said for the idea that the very distance between reader and subject is the source of poetic allure, that this distance lends a feeling of truth to what we read. Yet it seems to me not only the illusion of distance, but also the illusion of closeness, and perhaps also the tension between these two illusions which has caused A Whole Life to garner acclaim not only on its home turf, where it can be somewhat more recognizably filed under Heimat-/Antiheimatliteratur (close in many ways to the English notion of the pastoral but carrying, with Heimat’s translation as homeland, a slightly more nationalistic weight), but also—a more difficult and in some ways more illuminating feat—in the English-speaking world. Though the brevity and compression of this tale suggests that its author’s aims are the very opposite of, for example, Karl Ove Knausgaard’s, whose 3,500-page chronicle of his own life has met with unparalleled enthusiasm in America, it is hard not to wonder if they share a certain sensibility that touches a nerve with the contemporary reading public.
The same family of words is mustered to describe this sensibility in every English-language review this book has inspired, and in some German ones as well: simple, quiet, calm, spare. Praised are Seethaler’s sensitivity to detail, his precision, his gentleness, the valuing of those things which might seem marginal, uninteresting, mundane. In other words, a focus on the ordinary, rather than the extraordinary, captured in a fittingly simple style. Thus the tension between closeness and distance: in a world utterly (and comfortingly) different from our own) we are met with a character whose actions and desires are so (comfortingly) simple as to provoke immediate recognition, and to carry an aura of wisdom. Andreas Egger’s is a world heavy with nouns and verbs; the subjective adjective hardly comes into it.
This world and these concerns have indeed been captured admirably by Seethaler, but it is a mode he has always practiced. A Whole Life is his fifth book, and his first to be brought into English. His prose is, although simple, unquestionably elegant; much is done with little and a strong sense of place, feeling, and character evoked with a seeming minimum of effort. The sentences often achieve a sense of rhythm, and the book as a whole is shrewdly paced. Brief episodes of lyricism are tuned to the character and his surroundings, so as not to feel out of place or superfluous:
The sun was low, and even the distant mountaintops stood out so clearly that it was as if someone had just finished painting them onto the sky. Right beside him a lone sycamore burned yellow; a little further off some cows were grazing, casting long, slim shadows that kept pace with them step for step across the meadow. A group of hikers was sitting beneath the canopy of a small calving shed. Egger could hear them talking and laughing amongst themselves, and their voices seemed to him both strange and agreeable. He thought of Marie’s voice and how much he had liked to listen to it. He tried to recall its melody and sound, but they eluded him. ‘If only I still had her voice, at least,’ he said to himself. Then he rolled slowly over to the next steel girder, climbed down and went in search of sandpaper.
This brief foray into feeling via observation, without any lapse into sentimentality, is one of the hallmarks of Seethaler’s style. A Whole Life is structured so that reflection and commentary, which often coincide with episodes told out of strict chronology, become more frequent as the book draws to its conclusion. This is one of the excellent tricks of Seethaler’s pacing: the satisfying hints of direction and meaning—always filtered through Egger’s simple perception, and therefore understated—are delivered at the point where it becomes clear to the reader that there will be little more to uncover, narratively at least, about the path of his life.
And here the question of what we seek from literature once again arises. Although A Whole Life has been praised for simplicity, quietness, calmness, sparseness, sensitivity to detail, precision, and gentleness, these cannot necessarily be considered universally positive terms. Rather, they bespeak certain common desires of the contemporary reading community: a hunger for the neatly contained, a confirmation of the worth of those things we all have access to—simple materials, simple language. A wish to see ourselves reflected in what we read, while also feeling we have encountered something outside the realm of our immediate experience. Most of all, perhaps, a longing for peace from our reading, an almost Zen-inflected search for wisdom. Is it heartening or troubling that these elements are so valued in our contemporary moment?
Those whose primary literary values are other than the above may well find A Whole Life less than fulfilling. Those readers, for example, who prize language that does not simply achieve elegance and accuracy, but pushes its own limits or strives for musicality will be disappointed. So too will fans of formal innovation, story junkies, and those who take pleasure in a Benjaminian sort of untidiness—the sense that a text has not provided an answer, but rather questions that can be approached again and again—find themselves wishing for more. At the end of this book, a life story has been told, and perhaps certain lessons can be learned from it. The book’s current popularity suggests that the lessons have been internalized perhaps too well: in praising it readers show that they too have been satisfied with something modest, that they, like Egger, agree that it is enough.
To some degree the book’s success in the English-speaking world must also be attributed to the fact that its style is familiar, rather than alienating or challenging, as some translated literature may be expected to be—regardless whether one sees this as an asset or a distraction. This is turn can be attributed to Charlotte Collins’ attentive and (for once this adjective may be more than mere cliché) seamless translation. Reproducing simple prose, where every word must be chosen for maximum impact without losing its lightness and grace, is in some ways more challenging than mimicking a more elaborate or idiosyncratic author’s style, and Charlotte Collins has hewn brilliantly to language and syntax that fit the milieu; she somehow manages to make the prose feel homey and familiar even when describing a world—complete with slightly antiquated or countrified speech patterns, and farm or mountaineering terminology—that is unfamiliar to British and American readers. Hers is a truly praiseworthy accomplishment, and even for this reason alone the book deserves the attention it has gotten—both in the press and in being named a finalist for the Man Booker International prize.
Following the success of this book, Seethaler’s 2012 book Der Trafikant will be published later this year, again, happily, in Charlotte Collins’ translation, under the English title The Tobacconist. Like the rest of Seethaler’s œuvre, The Tobacconist is a book with a slightly more dramatic premise and more narrative drive than A Whole Life, yet his body of work is united by an interest in characters that live on the margins: washed-up musicians, runaways, gas station attendants. Common too to all Seethaler’s books is the outsider’s search for, or unexpected encounter with love—usually a kind of love portrayed as upsetting and confusing, but ultimately transformative in a positive sense, and (undoubtedly) rather charming to the reader. This trope is also visible in A Whole Life: Egger’s enduring love for his lost wife has been noted as a crucial driving force behind his incessant labor. “He is sustained by the love he once experienced,” Eileen Battersby concludes in a review she penned for The Irish Times. Yet the core of this book seems to me to be more subtle than she suggests, and therefore more interesting, even if not earth-shattering. Seethaler ultimately succeeds in fixing something that is very difficult to grasp, particularly in literature, where the scrutiny on “meaning” is particularly intense: life as worthy and precious regardless of the content it is filled with. This is what life is, the book seems to say: it is simply living, breathing, eating, moving—the things that we all share and never stop doing until the day we die. This is perfectly expressed in the eponymous line, which is delivered to Egger by his boss with the same deadpan lack of sentimentality as Horned Hannes’ opening monologue on death: “You can buy a man’s hours off him, you can steal his days from him, or you can rob him of his whole life, but no one can take away from any man so much as a single moment. That’s the way it is. Now leave me in peace!” No other phrase, perhaps, could so succinctly encapsulate a book that in so few pages encompasses Egger’s history and his reader’s vainglory.
Anne Posten translates literature from German and teaches writing at Queens College, CUNY.
June 3 2016
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Review: A Whole Life by Robert Seethaler
Kerryn Goldsworthy
A Whole Life
Robert Seethaler, trans. Charlotte Collins
Picador, $18.99
In his early childhood, just after the beginning of the 20th century, Andreas Egger is orphaned and subsequently endures a life of hard work, privation and beatings on his uncle-by-marriage's farm. Thereafter this novella is exactly what is promised by its title: Andreas grows up, he learns, he works, he marries, he goes to war, he grows old. He suffers disappointments, he appreciates small and simple joys, and he endures one swift and appalling tragedy.
This short, unadorned novel has something monumental about it, like a small mountain. It's reminiscent in different ways of Gerbrand Bakker's The Twin and Willy Vlautin's Lean on Pete, a more optimistic and less brutal work than either, but with the same understated realism. Yet with its dramatic European alpine landscapes and its looming central figure, empathetically but never sentimentally drawn, it also has the feel of a folk tale.
Book review: The Tobacconist, by Robert Seethaler Robert Seethaler PIC: LEON NEAL/AFP/Getty Images) Robert Seethaler PIC: LEON NEAL/AFP/Getty Images) Roger Cox In his 2014 novel A Whole Life, first translated into English last year and subsequently shortlisted for the Man Booker International Prize, the Austrian-born, Berlin-based writer Robert Seethaler pulled off a remarkable feat. In a mere 124 pages, he filtered much of the story of 20th century Austria through the life of one man – a farmer turned cable car engineer turned soldier turned mountain guide called Andreas Egger – somehow ending up with a book that felt both epic in scope and rich in incidental detail. In The Tobacconist, published in German in 2012 and available in English later this month in a translation by Charlotte Collins, he relies on a similar mechanism, although in this case the period of history he concerns himself with is much shorter – the couple of years immediately before the outbreak of the Second World War – the action is confined almost entirely to Vienna, rather than being spread all around Europe, and the character at the centre of the story is a much more troubled soul. Like Andreas, Franz Huchel is originally from the mountains, but unlike Andreas, who remains an optimist no matter what the Fates throw at him, Franz is given to sudden, dramatic mood swings. Sent to the city to work as an assistant to the tobacconist Otto Trsnyek, a man his mother says owes her a favour (“It was a hot summer that year, and we were young and foolish…”) he soon meets and falls in love with a sexually assertive Bohemian showgirl called Anezka, whose erratic behaviour leaves him exhausted, heartbroken and badly in need of some quality time on a psychiatrist’s couch. As luck would have it, a certain Professor Sigmund Freud just so happens to be a regular customer at the tobacconist’s shop, and before long, in exchange for a couple of good cigars, Franz is receiving regular, informal therapy sessions from the father of psychoanalysis, even as the Anschluss is declared and war looms. If that all sounds faintly ridiculous, perhaps that’s because it is, yet Seethaler makes the interactions between Franz and Freud so credible and so engaging that it doesn’t take long to get over the initial shock of incongruity. What some readers might find more problematic is the way Franz appears to be oddly unaware of what’s happening to the Jews under Nazi rule, or at least oddly detached from it (and this in spite of his association with Freud, who is in the process of preparing to leave Vienna, and under constant surveillance from the Gestapo). At one point he laughs at a satirical music hall act referencing Dachau, “although secretly he wasn’t sure if he’d understood it all properly” – and yet he is made to read the newspapers every day by Trsnyek as part of his apprenticeship. Even his big act of rebellion against the state, when it comes, seems more personal than political, motivated by a sense of injustice at the circumstances of one particular case rather than by disgust at the brutal system that caused it. So should we read Franz as a sort of excuse for the fact that only relatively few Austrians tried to do anything to prevent the Holocaust? An attempt to illustrate how difficult it was for the ordinary man in the street to grasp the enormity of what was happening? In fact, Seethaler is making the opposite point: at a time when many people must surely have been aware of what was going on yet chose to do nothing, he gives us a protagonist who is largely unaware of what’s going on yet still chooses to do something. Never mind whether you fully understand the politics of a situation, Seethaler seems to be saying, if your instincts tell you something is unjust, act on them. All of which makes The Tobacconist essential reading for the early years of the 21st century. *The Tobacconist by Robert Seethaler, translated by Charlotte Collins, Picador, £18.99
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The Tobacconist by Robert Seethaler review — no smoke without fire
A novel that draws on Freud to explore social ambiguity in Nazi Austria
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December 9, 2016
by: Adrian Turpin
In his moving 2014 novel A Whole Life, Robert Seethaler tells the tale of a man’s life spent almost entirely in a secluded Austrian valley. His hero, Andreas Egger, is as fixed and austere as the mountains around him. While it’s not an existence many would envy, Seethaler finds a stoic nobility in his hero’s very lack of horizons.
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But what if you can’t stay sheltered in your valley? What if, like countless Austrians in the run-up to the second world war, history refuses to leave you alone? This is the premise of Seethaler’s The Tobacconist, written a couple of years before A Whole Life but only just translated into English by Charlotte Collins. With its themes of denial and self-preservation in the face of the unspeakable, the book has touched a nerve in Germany, selling more than 200,000 copies.
The Tobacconist begins, fittingly, with a doomed attempt to hold the outside world at bay. In the summer of 1937, 17-year-old Franz Huchel huddles under the bedclothes as thunder and lightning crash over his family’s cottage in the Attersee. The storm is symbolic of the political tempest about to engulf Austria. But it’s real enough to kill a man and, unfortunately for Franz, that man is his mother’s lover and benefactor.
Deprived of patronage, the boy is dispatched to Vienna to become a tobacconist’s apprentice. Franz is initially overwhelmed by the city, which he imagines seething “like the vegetable stew on Mother’s stove”. But his employer, a war veteran called Otto, turns out to be kindly and the work isn’t hard, consisting mainly of reading newspapers, a task Otto calls “the only meaningful and relevant part of being a tobacconist”.
It would almost be cosy if it wasn’t for the Nazis. Reading the papers may offer Franz “a little inkling of the possibilities of the world”. But he is naively — or wilfully? — slow to acknowledge what is on his doorstep. Even late on in the book, when his Jewish customers vanish, he speculates absurdly that they might be “sitting in their apartments, keeping quiet, and had temporarily given up reading and smoking”.
In love, Franz is almost as blind, falling head-over-heels for gap-toothed cabaret artist Anezka, who keeps him at arm’s length. Franz is in turmoil. But, happily, Sigmund Freud is among the shop’s regulars. He and the young man strike up an unlikely friendship, trading Havanas for romantic advice. This odd-couple relationship may strike the reader as a little convenient. But at least Seethaler’s version of Freud is an intriguing one — not the colossus of legend but a frail old man with a false jaw and a daughter who, literally and metaphorically, wears the trousers. He is fallible, almost broken by the knowledge of how limited his discipline is.
Freud certainly gets the most haunting line of the book, when Franz asks how a person can justify personal concerns at a time of political and social turbulence. “We could turn the question on its head,” the professor mischievously replies. “What justification is there for all these crazy world events, when you have your worries?”
This question sits at the heart of The Tobacconist. It’s a novel about whether, faced with a world of which we have little understanding or control, we turn inwards or outwards, whether we create a haven or wade into the chaos. For Andreas in A Whole Life, escape is to be found in rural solitude. In The Tobacconist the natural world again offers solace, the promise of a prelapsarian life. But for Franz there is to be no simple escape to the country. Seethaler has other plans for his very ordinary hero.
Does The Tobacconist share the romantic chutzpah, the theatricality of A Whole Life? Does it feel, like that slender volume, that it has been hewn out of a single piece of stone? Is it as instantly readable? No, on all three counts. It’s uneven in tone, hesitant, a bit sprawly. But in some ways it feels like a more honest, less sentimental piece of work, dispensing with certainties to embrace shades of moral grey. For that you have to respect it.
The Tobacconist, by Robert Seethaler, translated by Charlotte Collins, Picador, RRP£12.99, 240 pages
Adrian Turpin is director of the Wigtown Book Festival
The Tobacconist by Robert Seethaler review – bittersweet follow-up to A Whole Life
Robert Seethaler has another hit on his hands with this coming-of-age tale set in pre-war Vienna
Robert Seethaler follows up last year’s bestselling A Whole Life with this ominous tale about growing up fast in pre-war Austria. It’s 1937, and 17-year-old Franz Huchel leaves the calm shores of the Attersee for an apprenticeship with a Viennese tobacconist. The city is heavy with threat: there are bombs in the park and Nazis on the Ringstrasse. However, with its newspapers and customers such as Sigmund Freud, the shop remains a citadel of reason. There is a sharp quirkiness to the story. Suffering from homesickness and girl trouble, Franz turns to Freud, who dispenses wisdom (“Even the best of us are dashed to pieces on the rocks of the Feminine”) in return for hand-rolled cheroots. Seethaler blends tragedy and whimsy to create a bittersweet picture of youthful ideals getting clobbered by external forces. The result is a little like Great Expectations, only with dachshunds and strudel.