The Search for Heinrich Schlögel

Starred review from June 9, 2014
In the latest from Baillie (The Incident Report), written in beautiful prose, 20-year-old Heinrich Schlögel sets off on a hiking trip into the Arctic wilderness of Canada’s Baffin Island in 1908. He emerges two weeks later to find that, although he has not aged, 30 years have elapsed since he began the trip. An archivist, whose own motives and history we learn about primarily via footnotes, pieces together his mysterious life; she collects letters, diary entries, even a drawing of a map (included in the text), but reminds us that, given the same evidence, another narrator might “tell Heinrich’s story differently than I do, what they’d want from Heinrich would be different.” Heinrich is drawn from Germany to the Arctic by the diary of Samuel Hearne, an 18th-century British explorer, and by the urging of his polyglot sister, Inge, whose fascination with the Inuktitut language leads her to discoveries of appalling cases of aboriginal exploitation, sufferings to which Heinrich, on his dreamlike adventure, bears witness. Baillie delivers a work of magical realism that captures the experience of postcolonial guilt (as her archivist observes, “Soon we will all have to pay off our debts”) and gives voice to a silenced past. The temporal shift works perfectly, producing an effect of ghostly haunting alongside childlike wonder.

August 1, 2014
An emotionally distant expat travels into the wilds of Canada, where he disappears into a rift in time. This Canadian slice of magical realism by Baillie (The Incident Report, 2009, etc.) is largely about the search for meaning among the vestigial fragments of an unremarkable life. The story is told by an unnamed narrator who's meticulously reconstructing the travels of one Heinrich Schlogel, a young German wanderer whose only affections are for his polyglot sister, Inge. We first meet Heinrich in his youth, bicycling through Germany and indulging his fascination with animals. When Inge gives him the diaries of Samuel Hearne, a real-life British explorer who navigated across Northern Canada to the Arctic Ocean, Heinrich becomes determined to repeat the exercise. But on the advice of a new friend, he heads instead to the remote interior of Baffin Island, where his doubts threaten to overtake him. "I should have followed Hearne's route, gone to the Western Arctic," he thinks. "But Hearne's path would still not have been my own path. How am I to find a route of my own?" In a surreal twist, Schlogel sets out on his journey in 1980 and thinks he's spent only two weeks in the wilderness. Arriving back in civilization, though, he's startled to find that 30 years have passed. His mother is dead, and his father denies that he is who he says he is, so Heinrich has only his sister to help him navigate this odd mix of the old world and the new. The novel is beautifully composed and walks a fine line between Heinrich's internal debates and the narrator's possibly unreliable obsession with his fate. However, it doesn't end as much as stop, so readers looking for a satisfying sense of closure may be left wanting. A poetic journey into mystery that asks hazy questions about time, culture and one's sense of self.

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September 1, 2014

Metafiction, once a niche genre favored mostly by academics, has recently become more mainstream with books by David Mitchell and J.J. Abrams. Baillie has explored the genre in other novels (The Incident Report; The Shape I Gave You) and perfected it here. Our narrator is a lonely archivist, recently orphaned, who collects books, journal entries, maps, and photos related to the novel's subject, Heinrich. Heinrich grew up in a small town in Germany and was close to his troubled sister, who learns languages quickly, such as the disappearing Inuktitut. Heinrich works harvesting hops to save money to follow his own obsession, a trek through the wilderness in northern Canada. His journey includes many mystical elements, such as hallucinations that make him question his admiration for the explorers that led him there. When Heinrich returns to civilization, he finds it much changed. VERDICT The beautiful descriptions of the wild outdoors in northern Canada alone make this book worth reading. Baillie is an excellent storyteller, combining adventure with deeper elements and the characters' search for self. Highly recommended.--Kate Gray, Worcester P.L., MA

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