A Whole Life

July 4, 2016
The life chronicled in Seethaler’s poignant novel is, at first glance, unremarkable: Andreas Egger begins and ends his life in an Alpine valley village, where he arrives after his mother’s death in 1902, and to which he returns in 1951, after years as a POW in Russia. Egger, however, contains multitudes: subjected to childhood beatings that leave him with a permanent limp, he stands up to his abusive uncle and goes on to become an expert cable-car company employee, as well as a devoted husband and father. But the mountainous land he loves—and through which, in his middle age, he leads groups of hiking tourists—is far from serene. The titanic forces of nature and politics determine Egger’s arduous course through the 20th century. Not always successfully, Seethaler seeks to avoid sentimentality. Readers will discover in his contained prose a vehicle for keen insight and observation: Egger, touched for the first time by his future wife, experiences “a very subtle pain... more profound than any had encountered,” and later, watching the Moon landing with his neighbors in their new parish hall, he feels “mysteriously close and connected to the villagers down here on the darkened Earth.” Nearing his end, Egger “couldn’t remember where he had come from, and ultimately he didn’t know where he would go. But he could look back without regret... with a full-throated laugh and utter amazement.”

July 1, 2016
In this quiet, serenely powerful novel, a man lives out his life in a remote mountain village as the bulk of the 20th century sweeps past.Andreas Egger is a small boy, an orphan, when he's brought by horse cart to a small village in the mountains. It's 1902. The farmer who takes him in also beats him, and Andreas leaves when he turns 18. Then he goes about scraping together a living. Left with a bad limp--a vestige of a particularly bad beating--Andreas still wrests his living from the earth through hard physical labor. Decades pass. What else happens? It's hard to say. This slim novel relies less on the engine of a plot than on the lyricism of its own poetry. Andreas does fall in love, marry, and lose his wife to a devastating avalanche that wrecks their home. The snow sweeps Andreas along in its flow. Similarly, Andreas is swept along by the major moments of the 20th century. Modernity arrives in the form of the cable cars that Andreas helps to erect on the side of the mountain. Later, television and tourists arrive, too, as Andreas looks on. Before that, though, there is the second world war to contend with. Andreas spends two months as a soldier and eight years as a prisoner of war in Russia. But this experience takes up little more than 10 pages, and then Andreas returns home. The novel seems to skim through all of these struggles, small and large, personal and historical. Seethaler, a Vienna-born writer and actor, writes with quiet serenity, elegance, and grace. But there's something almost too smooth about all of this. Lyrical as the work is, in the end it is also somehow slippery and ungraspable. Andreas is born, lives his life, and dies. So do we all. But there must be something more to say about it. An elegant, understated book about a simple man still leaves something wanting.

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September 1, 2016
Austrian-born actor and novelist Seethaler delivers a slender, meditative novel about nature, love, and simple living. Born around the dawn of the twentieth century, Andreas Egger has spent his entire life in a rural, alpine village, where he roams the mountains. Forced to live with an abusive relative as a child, Egger has had a limp ever since and now rarely speaks. Though most people would consider his hobbling a handicap, ever-resilient and optimistic Egger uses it as an advantage as he traverses the uneven, snowy mountain landscape. He has embraced a life of struggle, even building a tiny home on a craggy plot of land high above the village. When at last he falls in love and takes up work clearing trees for a new cable car, his perception of the mountain begins to change, and survival takes on a new meaning as the reality of war sweeps in. A tender and moving look at the human capacity for adaptation, Seethaler's understated tale is a reminder that joy can be found in daily toils and simple pleasures.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2016, American Library Association.)