Who Is Martha?
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- 12,99 €
Beschreibung des Verlags
"Vividly drawn characters, history, music, birds, love, loneliness, and wisdom . . . A brilliant book, rich and satisfying as a Viennese torte" (Sy Montgomery, author of Birdology).
In this poignant yet rollicking novel, ninety-six-year-old ornithologist Luka Levadski forgoes treatment for lung cancer and moves from Ukraine to Vienna to make a grand exit in a luxury suite at the Hotel Imperial. He reflects on his past while indulging in Viennese cakes and savoring music in a gilded concert hall. Levadski was born in 1914, the same year that Martha—the last of the now-extinct passenger pigeons—died. Levadski too has an acute sense of being the last of a species.
He may have devoted much of his existence to studying birds, but now he befriends a hotel butler and another elderly guest, who also doesn't have much time left, to share in the lively escapades of his final days. This gloriously written tale is "a book like a fantastic party, as unshakeable as a child's faith [that] astonishes to the very end" (Neue Zürcher Zeitung).
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Gaponenko s novel is a mostly successful portrayal of a terminally ill nonagenarian who decides to leave life with a bang. Luka Levadski, a 96-year-old world-renowned ornithologist, looks at his past with perspicacity, trying to understand his father s early suicide and his own youthful fascination for birds and passion for classical music. When he is diagnosed with lung cancer, he resists his doctor s recommendation for treatment and buys sharp new clothes and a silver-handled walking stick instead. With the intention to die, checks into a suite at the grand Hotel Imperial in Vienna bills be damned. Problems arise when the effects of his disease and a penchant for alcohol kick in, resulting in puzzling hallucinations including the appearance it s unclear whether it s real or imaginary of a young woman from the Soviet Union. These fantasies muddy the latter part of the narrative a bit, but the inclusion of Levadski s new friends, the hotel butler and another elderly guest, elevate this story of joie de vivre in the face of death.
