Savannah, it turns out, is catatonic, and before the suicide attempt had completely assumed the identity of a dead friend-the implication being that she couldn't stand being a Wingo anymore. When he hears that his fierce, beautiful twin sister Savannah, a well-known New York poet, has once again attempted suicide, he escapes his present emasculation by flying north to meet Savannah's comely psychiatrist, Susan Lowenstein.
Tom Wingo is an unemployed South Carolinian football coach whose internist wife is having an affair with a pompous cardiac man. But there must be something more to say about it.Īn elegant, understated book about a simple man still leaves something wanting.Ī flabby, fervid melodrama of a high-strung Southern family from Conroy ( The Great Santini, The Lords of Discipline), whose penchant for overwriting once again obscures a genuine talent. Andreas is born, lives his life, and dies. Lyrical as the work is, in the end it is also somehow slippery and ungraspable.
But there's something almost too smooth about all of this. Seethaler, a Vienna-born writer and actor, writes with quiet serenity, elegance, and grace. The novel seems to skim through all of these struggles, small and large, personal and historical. But this experience takes up little more than 10 pages, and then Andreas returns home. Andreas spends two months as a soldier and eight years as a prisoner of war in Russia. Before that, though, there is the second world war to contend with. Later, television and tourists arrive, too, as Andreas looks on. Modernity arrives in the form of the cable cars that Andreas helps to erect on the side of the mountain. Similarly, Andreas is swept along by the major moments of the 20th century. The snow sweeps Andreas along in its flow. Andreas does fall in love, marry, and lose his wife to a devastating avalanche that wrecks their home. This slim novel relies less on the engine of a plot than on the lyricism of its own poetry. Left with a bad limp-a vestige of a particularly bad beating-Andreas still wrests his living from the earth through hard physical labor. Then he goes about scraping together a living. The farmer who takes him in also beats him, and Andreas leaves when he turns 18. In this quiet, serenely powerful novel, a man lives out his life in a remote mountain village as the bulk of the 20th century sweeps past.Īndreas Egger is a small boy, an orphan, when he's brought by horse cart to a small village in the mountains.
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