The Right Hand of Sleep
A Novel
-
-
5.0 • 1 Rating
-
-
- $8.99
-
- $8.99
Publisher Description
This extraordinary debut novel from Whiting Writers’ Award winner John Wray is a poetic portrait of a life redeemed at one of the darkest moments in world history.
Twenty years after deserting the army in the first world war, Oskar Voxlauer returns to the village of his youth. Haunted by his past, he finds an uneasy peace in the mountains–but it is 1938 and Oskar cannot escape from the rising tide of Nazi influence in town. He attempts to retreat to the woods, only to be drawn back by his own conscience and the chilling realization that the woman whose love might finally save him is bound to the local SS commander. Morally complex, brilliantly plotted, and heartbreakingly realized, The Right Hand of Sleep marks the beginning of an important literary career.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
The ghost hovering over this assured and astonishingly mature first novel is that of Joseph Roth, the great interwar Austrian novelist. Perhaps this reflects Wray's own double origin, as the son of an Austrian father and an American mother. Oskar Voxlauer, Wray's Austrian protagonist, was a teenage deserter from the Austro-Hungarian army in WWI. As the novel begins, he is returning to his native village, Niessen bei Villach, in 1938, after a 19-year stay in the Ukraine. His Russian lover's death has released him, and he is coming back in the middle of Hitler's Anschluss to see his lonely mother. To escape the tensions in Niessen, Oskar goes to work as a gamekeeper on a stretch of forest his Jewish tavernkeeper friend Ryslavy owns outside town. There he meets the old gamekeeper's daughter, Else Bauer, who lives under a vague cloud, having borne a daughter out of wedlock. The two are briefly happy together, but then Else's cousin, Kurt, returns to Austria from exile in Germany, as the head of the Nazis in Niessen. Kurt is also, Oskar quickly discovers, more to Else than a cousin. Oskar publicly opposes the Nazis; Kurt ambiguously patronizes him. Soon the triangle between Else, Oskar and Kurt becomes fraught with menace. The gloom of the dark days of late '30s Austria is heightened by Oskar's recollections of personal trauma: his wartime experiences; the suicide of his father, a famous opera composer; and the brutal collectivization of the Ukrainian countryside. Wray's first novel displays psychological acuity, a mastery of dialogue and an unfailing historical empathy, and should garner deserved raves.
