Adam and Evelyn
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- USD 3.99
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- USD 3.99
Publisher Description
From one of Germany’s finest writers comes a wonderfully light and humorous novel set during the tumultuous events of 1989. A wobbling Hungary has just opened its borders to Austria enabling a flood of refugees to escape, the Berlin Wall is on the cusp of falling, and, yet, seemingly sheltered from this onrushing new world in their idyllic East German home are Adam, a tailor and dressmaker who enjoys a life of dressing (and undressing) his appreciative clientele, and Evelyn, Adam’s restless girlfriend.
Having just unexpectedly quit her job as a waitress, Evelyn returns home one day to find Adam sleeping with one of his customers. Calmly, but quickly, Evelyn packs her belongings and runs off to Hungary on a vacation she had originally planned to take with Adam. Accompanying Evelyn on her journey is her friend Simone and Michael, Simone’s West German cousin. In hot pursuit, however, to everyone’s surprise or dismay, is Adam. Following the group in his family’s rickety 1961 Communist-made automobile, Adam chases after Evelyn, banishing himself from his Garden of Eden as she pursues her very own idea of heaven. As Adam and Evelyn are swept out on a Western tide of new freedoms—helping refugees and helping themselves to impetuous trysts with others along the way—they find themselves forced to adjust to life in a world forever changed. Paradise regained? Perhaps not.
Upending our expectations from the start, Adam and Evelyn is a deceptively simple love story that will enthrall longtime readers and those new to the delights of Ingo Schulze’s stories alike.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
There's no doubt that Schulze (One More Story: Thirteen Stories in the Time-Honored Mode) wants to evoke Adam and Eve cast out of paradise with his latest novel. But what is paradise here? East Germany, where Adam, a tailor, sleeps with his clients despite live-in girlfriend Evelyn? If so, paradise is lost when Evelyn discovers Adam's infidelities and takes off to Hungary with a man from the West. Home-loving Adam packs their pet tortoise into his beloved Wartburg 311 to pursue her and the political overtakes the personal: it's 1989. The book, ably translated by Woods, is full of homely details of life behind the wall, in Hungary, and in the West, and of people accommodating to what happens when those details change. Accidental migr Adam is diagnosed with "emigration syndrome" and "adaptation problems," which his namesake must surely have had as well. Schulze's Evelyn has a different problem: she's underwritten and it's not entirely clear why Adam's so smitten. (The same can be said, arguably, of her biblical counterpart.) But this is a minor problem in an otherwise likable book that reveals how world-changing events play out at the domestic level and offers a thoughtful meditation on temptation, expulsion, and what constitutes home.
