Mohr
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- $9.99
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- $9.99
Publisher Description
When a solitary man stumbles upon a cache of photographs, sometimes—and only sometimes—he can sense the lives of the people in them. Sometimes he can find in their faces, and in the way they hold themselves or the way they perform before the camera, the light trace of their story.
Following just that path, acclaimed novelist Frederick Reuss has created a love story of historic proportions. Mohr: A Novel is about a man and wife whose life together is marked irreparably by a deeply troubled and world-testing era.
With the sort of enthralling narrative step that always marks his work, Reuss allows their story to rise from a cache of photographs he uncovered in Germany—photographs from the 1920s and ’30s of the exiled Jewish playwright and novelist Max Mohr; Käthe, the beautiful wife he left behind; and Eva, their daughter, who would live through it all but would never really understand what had happened.
The interplay between Reuss’s revealing prose and the real faces in nearly 50 photographs offers a reading experience that may be unprecedented in novels. From the first paragraph and that first creased image, which Eva may have taken, of the Mohrs at their table in Germany just before Max walked away from their lives, this beautiful and powerful novel works as deeply on the reader as a family photo album.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Reuss follows up the antic infantilism of The Wasties (2002) with what might be called a documentary historical. At the novel's center is the real-life German-Jewish novelist and playwright Max Mohr; exiled from Germany in 1934, he chose to emigrate to China, leaving his wife, K the, and daughter, Eva, at their Bavarian home, and working as a doctor (for which he was trained) as China's war with Japan raged. The book is Reuss's explicit attempt to write Mohr back into the historical record and to understand his choices. To that end, he includes 47 actual photographs of Mohr, his family and their surroundings (some of which Reuss interprets), and Reuss also foregrounds his own place in the work. After an extended second-person address, Reuss tells his character Mohr, "I say you, but I mean me. In novels, personal pronouns can be misleading. This is not an easy idea to express, and some will call the notion absurd. But why not? Why can't I be you? Or him or her?" The results are mixed as a novel, but Reuss succeeds in giving vivid shape to Mohr's life the major events (including possible WWII spy intrigue in China) and the mundane (taking foxglove to keep his pulse regular). If not a man in full, the book contains a man kaleidoscopic.
