with a full-throated laugh and utter amazement.” (Sept. 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. 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. Not always successfully, Seethaler seeks to avoid sentimentality. He is a man of very few words and so, when he. The titanic forces of nature and politics determine Egger’s arduous course through the 20th century. Andreas lives his whole life in the Austrian Alps, where he arrives as a young boy taken in by a farming family. But the mountainous land he loves-and through which, in his middle age, he leads groups of hiking tourists-is far from serene. A Whole Life is his fifth book, and his first to be brought into English. 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. 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.
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