The Thumbnail Book Reviews
by John Q McDonald --- 27 August 2024
by Robert Seethaler
It would seem that, at just 151 pages, this book is far too short to encompass A Whole Life. We all live rich full experiences for the twenty or thirty thousand days we're given on this planet. Surely, such an experience must take up a whole lot more space. Infinite Jest-length tomes at least? But that is the inherent pure beauty of Seethaler's novel. The reader can reach the end and feel that he or she has, actually, seen a whole life unfold.
There's a magical realism to the opening chapter, as Andreas Egger attempts to rescue a dying man from freezing to death in his mountain cabin in the middle of a blizzard. The year is 1933, and the place is the German Alps. Egger is drawn into a meditation on Time and Death that sets the somber tone of the rest of the novel, even though it drifts back toward a more realist sensibility. We go back to Egger's childhood, lost parents and suffering at the hands of a foster parent and the rigors of farm life. He grows and works hard. He is educated but not intellectual. He goes to work on the new elevated tram being built to climb a nearby mountain. He does this for years. He goes to war, of course, and spends most of it and more in Russia. When he returns, his mountain village home town is transformed by the passage of time. But Andreas never wanders far from it. He falls in love and marries. There's tragedy and a melancholy move forward in his life. And by the time it ends, in a modernity one doesn't expect in the opening chapters, it is easy to feel we've watched a whole life unfold and expire. Seethaler's writing (and its translation into English) is beautiful and evocative of nature and its mountain moods. We feel we know Egger and whatever gaps there are in the story (and surely there must be many?) are not missed. The book is an engaging and engrossing passage through a life. Recommended.