Darkenbloom
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5.0 • 1 Rating
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- £6.99
Publisher Description
A panoramic novel of European history, by an internationally bestselling writer.
The whole truth, as the name implies, is the collective knowledge of all those involved. Which is why you can never really piece it together again afterwards. Because some of those who possessed a part of it will already be dead. Or they’re lying, or their memories are bad.
It’s 1989, and in a small town on the Austria–Hungary border, nobody talks about the war; the older residents pretend not to remember, and the younger ones are too busy making plans to leave. The walls are thin, the curtains twitch, there is a face at every window, and everyone knows what they are not supposed to say.
But as thousands of East German refugees mass at the border, it seems that the past is knocking on Darkenbloom’s door.
Still, though, nobody talks about the war.
Until a mysterious visitor shows up asking questions.
Until townspeople start receiving threatening letters and even disappearing.
Until a body is found.
Darkenbloom is a sweeping novel of exiled counts, Nazis-turned-Soviet-enforcers, secret marriages, mislabelled graves, remembrance, guilt, and the devastating power of silence, by one of Austria’s most significant contemporary writers.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Menasse (Vienna) delivers an immersive, gloom-ridden tale of an Austrian town's secrets and tensions in the months before the fall of the Berlin Wall. Lowetz, 35, reluctantly returns from Vienna to the backwater border town of Darkenbloom, where he grew up, after he inherits his family home from his mother, Eszter. Alexander Gellért, a Jewish doctor whom Eszter kept hidden during WWII, arrives from the U.S. around the same time as Lowetz, hoping to learn more about his family history. Lowetz has little to share with Gellért, who then finds help from Flocke Malnitz, a young teacher who's been ruffling feathers around town by searching for Nazi war criminals. After Flocke is seen driving Gellért to various locations in Darkenbloom and going through town records with him, she arouses suspicion, and the plot thickens when she goes missing. The prose is overwrought ("The otherness of the place was enhanced by the infinitely slow destructive power of the vegetation"), but Menasse impresses with her portrayal of the townspeople's guilt and lingering prejudices, as they reckon with their complicity in the Holocaust and their fear of the Hungarian refugees who are massing at the border. This unsettling novel offers a singular sense of place.
