The Crooked Maid
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- 9,99 €
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- 9,99 €
Beschreibung des Verlags
Shortlisted for the Scotiabank Giller Prize 2013
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'Vyleta writes with the sharp, brutal clarity of cinematic freeze frames … Noir meets Gothic – a thrilling tale of war crimes, family secrets, murder and blackmail' Independent
'The atmosphere of postwar Europe, still seething with animosity, is wonderfully evoked and the tangled plot is thrilling' The Times
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The Second World War is over – and yet it lives on. As the initial phase of denazification draws to a close, people across Vienna begin to rebuild their lives amidst the rubble. Anna Beer returns to the city she fled years earlier upon discovering her husband's infidelity. She has come back to find him and, perhaps, to forgive him.
Travelling on the same train is eighteen-year-old Robert Seidel, a schoolboy summoned home to his stepfather's sickbed and the secrets of his family's past. As Anna and Robert navigate an unrecognizable city, beneath the bombed-out ruins a ghost of a man, wrapped in a red scarf, battles demons from his past and hides from a future that is deeply uncertain for all.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Set in Vienna in 1948 when the scars of WWII were fresh, Vyleta's well-crafted but overly elliptical new novel (after The Quiet Twin) begins with a chance encounter. Robert Seidel, "exiled" at his Swiss boarding school during the war and on his way home, meets Anna Beer, an older woman returning to Vienna to look for her estranged husband, a psychiatrist and former POW in a Russian camp. Seidel's household is darkly comic and highly dysfunctional: his mother insane, his father in a coma, his brother in jail for trying to murder the father, the family tenuously held together by the brusque street smarts of Eva Frey, the maid of the title (she has a deformity of the spine). The plot plods along, powered by the vaguest whisperings of suspense (Where is Beer's husband? What happened during the War? Is Robert's brother guilty?), but Vyleta's goal seems to be to couple a Graham Greene like atmosphere of suspicion and fear with a European intellectual novelistic endeavor (the story is a parable of guilt and reconciliation). Farcical, Kafkaesque, and teeming with odd leitmotifs (crows play a symbolic role), this novel could benefit from stronger storytelling and less symbolism, but should appeal to fans of writers like Heinrich B ll.