It looks at the moments, big and small, that make us what we are. An exquisite novel about a simple life, it has already demonstrated its power to move thousands of readers with a message of solace and truth. Like John Williams' Stoner or Denis Johnson's Train Dreams, A Whole Life is a tender book about finding dignity and beauty in solitude. He leaves his valley just once more, to fight in WWII - where he is taken prisoner in the Caucasus - and returns to find that modernity has reached his remote haven. When Marie dies in an avalanche, pregnant with their first child, Andreas' heart is broken. He is a man of very few words and so, when he falls in love with Marie, he doesn't ask for her hand in marriage, but instead has some of his friends light her name at dusk across the mountain. Shortlisted for The 2016 Man Booker International PrizeĪndreas lives his whole life in the Austrian Alps, where he arrives as a young boy taken in by a farming family. The book has been translated from its original German by Charlotte Collins. A Whole Life is his first work to be translated into English and is already a German bestseller, selling over 100,000 copies. Shortlisted for The 2017 International Dublin Literary Award Robert Seethaler is an Austrian living in Berlin and is the author of four previous novels. Shortlisted for The 2017 National Translation Award Set in the mid-twentieth century and told with beauty and tenderness, Robert Seethaler's A Whole Life is a story of man's relationship with an ancient landscape, of the value of solitude, of the arrival of the modern world, and above all, of the moments, great and small, that make us who we are.
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In a blend of complete sincerity and delicacy, so uniquely her own, Anne Morrow Lindbergh shares with the reader her awareness of the many frustrating elements we face today: the restlessness, the unending pressures and demands, the denial of leisure and silence, the threat to inner peace and integration, the uneasy balance of the opposites, man and woman. And the shells become symbols here for the various aspects of life she is contemplating. As the sea tosses up its gifts - shells rare and perfect - so the mind, left to its ponderings, brings up its own treasures of the deep. The setting of her book is the sea shore the time, a brief vacation which had lifted her from the distractions of everyday existence into the sphere of meditation. "Anne Morrow Lindbergh's reflections on a woman's life were matured in active years of family living and stimulated by conversations with men and women who experience the same problems and feel the same need for assessing the true values of life. Seemingly innocuous, English nursery rhymes often have a rather sinister origin and noone knew this better than Agatha Christie, who repeatedly used them as a motif most famously probably in 1939’s And Then There Were None (a/k/a Ten Little Indians), where the murderer kills his victims, one by one, in the fashion of the Ten Little Indians ditty.Ī Pocket Full of Rye is one of three Christie mysteries inspired by Sing a Song of Sixpence the others are the short stories Four and Twenty Blackbirds and Sing a Song of Sixpence, contained in the collections Three Blind Mice and The Witness For the Prosecution, respectively. There is a firm dividing line at the point where Farquhar’s perceptions no longer match the reality surrounding him. Though his experience is eventually shown to be an illusion, there’s a subtle implication that such an illusion still holds value and the potential for insight. Yet despite the fact that he doesn’t actually experience any of his “escape,” this illusion still fills the totality of his experience in the moment before his own death. Reality differs from Farquhar’s perceptions, and the reader ultimately can’t rely on what Farquhar sees to reflect the truth. This seems to suggest that humanity’s experience of reality is a construct of the mind, and that people can’t always trust what they see regardless of how real it feels. The last half of the story is an illusion, which eventually gives way to the ironic twist that Farquhar has, in fact, been hanged after all. Of course, that perception proves to be solely within the protagonist’s mind. But his journey is strange and surreal, reflecting both a series of hyper-intense observations about the world around him and details which suggest he might not even be on Earth anymore, but rather in some strange alternate dimension. In the moments before his death, Farquhar believes he is escaping from his Union captors-that the rope intended to hang him breaks-and that he takes a long and desperate journey home. |