Obscured text on back cover due to sticker attached. For fans of The Man Who Planted Trees by Jean Giono, Silk by Alessandro Baricco and Sandor Marai's Embers, Seethaler 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. 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. 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. 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. His resilience to come through some extremely painful episodes is a good essay on the power of the human spirit. 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. It is indeed a story of a whole life of a humble unassuming character who experienced life's ups and downs and forged his own way which often left him isolated and alone. with a full-throated laugh and utter amazement.” (Sept.'Heart-rending and heart-warming. more profound than any 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.

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. Robert Seethaler, who himself was born in Vienna in 1966, literally sucks the reader into a backwards rural milieu populated with gruff, unfriendly and sometimes brutal people. Not always successfully, Seethaler seeks to avoid sentimentality. The titanic forces of nature and politics determine Egger’s arduous course through the 20th century. But the mountainous land he loves-and through which, in his middle age, he leads groups of hiking tourists-is far from serene. 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.

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.

Robert seethaler a whole life review