The exiles return : a novel /

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Bibliographic Details
Author / Creator:De Waal, Elisabeth, 1899-1991.
Edition:First U.S. edition.
Imprint:New York : Picador, 2014.
©2013
Description:xiv, 319 pages ; 22 cm
Language:English
Subject:
Format: Print Book
URL for this record:http://pi.lib.uchicago.edu/1001/cat/bib/9857940
Hidden Bibliographic Details
ISBN:9781250045782 (hbk.)
1250045789 (hbk.)
9781250045799 (ebk.)
Notes:Originally published in the United Kingdom by Persephone Books in 2013.
Summary:"Vienna is demolished by war, the city an alien landscape of ruined castles, a fractured ruling class, and people picking up the pieces. Elisabeth de Waal's mesmerizing The Exiles Return is a stunningly vivid postwar story of Austria's fallen aristocrats, unrepentant Nazis, and a culture degraded by violence. The novel follows a number of exiles, each returning under very different circumstances, who must come to terms with a city in painful recovery. There is Kuno Adler, a Jewish research scientist, who is tired of his unfulfilling existence in America; Theophil Kanakis, a wealthy Greek businessman, seeking to plunder some of the spoils of war; Marie-Theres, a brooding teenager, sent by her parents in hopes that the change of scene will shake her out of her funk; and Prince "Bimbo" Grein, a handsome young man with a title divested of all its social currency. With immaculate precision and sensitivity, de Waal, an exile herself, captures a city rebuilding and relearning its identity, and the people who have to do the same. As mesmerizing as Stefan Zweig's The World of Yesterday, and as tragic as Hans Fallada's Every Man Dies Alone, de Waal has written a masterpiece of European literature, an artifact revealing a moment in our history, clear as a snapshot, but timeless as well"--
Review by New York Times Review

ELISABETH DE WAAL'S posthumously published novel takes place in the aftermath of some of the 20th century's greatest calamities, as it follows Austrian exiles returning to their homeland to encounter a dramatically altered physical and psychological landscape. By 1954, when the action of the novel begins, Vienna has witnessed not only the dissolution of the Austro-Hungarian Empire but the Anschluss and Hitler's reign of terror against the Jewish population, as well as repeated bombings during World War II and simultaneous occupation by four victorious foreign powers. Written during the late 1950s, "The Exiles Return" has an immediacy that makes de Waal's readers feel the experiences of its characters in a visceral way. Eighteen-year-old Marie-Theres (Resi) Larsen is the American daughter of Austrian émigrés. Exceptionally moody and even downright hostile, she frustrates her parents with her behavior, but instead of sending her to a psychiatrist, they opt for a change of scenery, sending her back to Europe to live with some relatives. As she is torn between two worlds, her emotional difficulties only mount when she arrives in Vienna. There she attracts the attention of a wealthy businessman, Theophil Kanakis, who has come to the city for very different reasons, hoping to increase his fortune by cashing in on the depressed, postwar economy. De Waal's most vividly drawn character is Kuno Adler, a research scientist who, despite building a comfortable life for himself in Manhattan, has abandoned his wife and returned to his native Vienna in part to escape his adopted country's ingrained anti-Semitism: "He had not been prepared for it in America, where, although there was no danger of physical extermination, there was an ever-present insidious consciousness of it, like a suppressed toothache which one could never quite forget." But, of course, the city of his birth has changed a great deal during his 15-year absence. De Waal brings these characters together in a tightly wound story of love, betrayal and class tension among Austria's aristocratic, clerical and intellectual spheres. If the plot can seem a bit like a PBS costume drama waiting to happen, so does de Waal's personal history. She was born in 1899 into what her grandson, Edmund de Waal (best known for his memoir, "The Hare With Amber Eyes"), calls in his foreword to the novel "a dynastic Jewish family that had adopted Vienna as its home." Before World War II, she studied law, economics and philosophy; wrote poetry; and engaged in an extensive correspondence with Rainer Maria Rilke. She would go on to write five unpublished novels and hold a fellowship at Columbia University, eventually settling in London. Clearly, she knew a little something about life as an exile, and she renders her characters' inner lives - most notably Resi's - with tremendous nuance. Any story that takes place amid major historical events runs the risk of what you might call, thinking of James Cameron's bloated 1997 movie, the Titanic effect. In many such novels, an all-too-real tragedy functions something like the static backdrop to an old cartoon, and the fictional characters never engage with it in any meaningful way. For the most part, "The Exiles Return" manages to sidestep that problem. "Who speaks of victory?" Rilke wrote. "To endure is everything." But that's not entirely true. With the publication, after all these years, of "The Exiles Return," we are allowed to hear a voice that has not only endured but, by the subtlety and fervor of its free expression, triumphed. ANDREW ERVIN'S second book, the novel "Burning Down George Orwell's House," will be published in 2015.

Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [January 26, 2014]
Review by Booklist Review

Readers of Edmund de Waal's gripping Jewish family history, The Hare with Amber Eyes (2010), will remember his brilliant, courageous grandmother, born Elisabeth von Ephrussi (1899-1991). A lawyer steeped in economics and philosophy, Elisabeth wrote poetry and, during the late 1950s, five novels, including this never-before-published, incisive, and tragic tale of bombarded and morally decimated postwar Vienna. In his foreword, Edmund explains that the novel is profoundly autobiographical, though Elisabeth cleverly covers her tracks. As the story begins, the paralyzed city is reluctantly repatriating Jewish exiles who fled the Nazis. Professor Kuno Adler returns to his old laboratory, where he confronts a self-confessed, unrepentant Nazi. Sent to stay with her aunt in the bucolic Austrian countryside, beautiful and diffident Marie-Theres, the American daughter of an exiled princess, is inextricably drawn into the decadent intrigues of Vienna's elite. De Waal's acid, eyewitness drama of malignant prejudice, innocence betrayed, the disintegration of the old order, and love transcendent has the same jolting immediacy as the novels of Irene Nemorisky as well as deeply archetypal dimensions. Another de Waal triumph of illumination.--Seaman, Donna Copyright 2010 Booklist

From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review

Until Edmund de Waal, Elisabeth de Waal's grandson, inherited "the yellowing typescript" of this historical novel, written in the 1950s, it languished and was untitled and unpublished in her lifetime. The setting is postwar Vienna, a city "of recognition and non-recognition, of the comfortably familiar and the frighteningly strange." After immigrating to the U.S. to escape Nazi persecution, Jewish scientist Kuno Adler returns to Vienna, where he finds love while fleeing the confines of his marriage. Adler comes face-to-face with Austria's recent past when he discovers that his supervisor is "one self-confessed, unrepentant Nazi." Marie-Theres is an aloof, pedigreed American teenager staying with family in Austria; her marriage plot weaves through the book and supplies the melodrama of its denouement. Will Resi marry down to Lucas Anreither, who is loving and stable, but the grandson of the family's gamekeeper? Or will she marry Lorenzo Grein, a titled aristocrat? Why does the wealthy Theophil Kanakis host salons and surround himself with Vienna's glittering youth? While the novel's prose is by turns lyrical and melancholy, and there's much to be admired in this elegy to loss and return, the novel's dramatic impact is ultimately thwarted by an operatic ending that betrays its age. (Jan.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.

(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review

Exile Kuno Adler, a fiftyish research pathologist now living in New York, decides to leave behind an unhappy marriage and two grown daughters to return to his native Austria, where post-World War II restitution and reparation laws allow him to resume his former laboratory position and where he manages to reconnect with some old acquaintances. His homecoming coincides with that of two others: Theophil Kanakis, a Greek millionaire who arrives from America with the dream of purchasing a derelict palace that he can restore to its former glory and in which he may entertain the rich and famous and Marie-Theres, the dreamy and disaffected American daughter of an Austrian princess, whose beauty is her eventual undoing. These three stories eventually come together in a sensational conclusion. VERDICT De Waal's grandson Edmund de Waal (The Hare with Amber Eyes) has succeeded in publishing his grandmother's posthumously discovered manuscript 75 years after the 1938 Anschluss that dislocated his family. This elegant novel should appeal to readers who admire the European stylishness of war-era books such as Irene Nemirovsky's Suite Francaise and Tatiana de Rosnay's Sarah's Key. [See Prepub Alert, 7/22/13.]-Barbara Love, Kingston -Frontenac P.L., Ont. (c) Copyright 2013. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review

An elegant, unpublished novel by the grandmother of Edmund de Waal, author of the best-seller The Hare with Amber Eyes (2010), explores the heartbreak of returning to postWorld War II Austria. Herself an exile, Elisabeth de Waal, born into a dynastic Jewish family in 1899, lived a privileged childhood in Vienna, became a writer who moved around Europe and died in 1991. This novel reveals her intelligence and articulateness as it evokes 1950s Vienna, haunted by the ghosts of its distant and more recent pasts. Professor Adler, a Jewish scientist, has returned to the city 15 years after being expelled because of his race. Wealthy Theophil Kanakis has also returned after making his fortune in America. And there's a third visitor: listless, 18-year-old Marie-Theres, who is related to a noble Viennese family although she was born and raised in the U.S. Adler seeks to reconnect, while Kanakis renovates his exquisite house, then fills it with interesting young people, including Prince Lorenzo "Bimbo" Grein, whose beauty is irresistible to both Kanakis and Marie-Theres. De Waal's cast of characters, which includes an unrepentant Nazi, presents a tableau of life and class in a ruined, now reconfiguring great city--a place of happiness for some, destruction for others. Restrained yet incisive, this finely observed novel lacks a resounding conclusion but nevertheless offers European mood music of a particular and beguiling resonance.]] Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
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