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Summary
Summary
NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Compared by critics to Kafka, Joyce, and Musil, H. G. Adler is becoming recognized as one of the towering figures of twentieth-century fiction. Nobel Prize winner Elias Canetti wrote that "Adler has restored hope to modern literature," and the first two novels rediscovered after his death, Panorama and The Journey, were acclaimed as "modernist masterpieces" by The New Yorker . Now his magnum opus, The Wall, the final installment of Adler's Shoah trilogy and his crowning achievement as a novelist, is available for the first time in English.
Drawing upon Adler's own experiences in the Holocaust and his postwar life, The Wall , like the other works in the trilogy, nonetheless avoids detailed historical specifics. The novel tells the story of Arthur Landau, survivor of a wartime atrocity, a man struggling with his nightmares and his memories of the past as he strives to forge a new life for himself. Haunted by the death of his wife, Franziska, he returns to the city of his youth and receives confirmation of his parents' fates, then crosses the border and leaves his homeland for good.
Embarking on a life of exile, he continues searching for his place within the world. He attempts to publish his study of the victims of the war, yet he is treated with curiosity, competitiveness, and contempt by fellow intellectuals who escaped the conflict unscathed. Afflicted with survivor's guilt, Arthur tries to leave behind the horrors of the past and find a foothold in the present. Ultimately, it is the love of his second wife, Johanna, and his two children that allows him to reaffirm his humanity while remembering all he's left behind.
The Wall is a magnificent epic of survival and redemption, powerfully told through stream of consciousness and suffused with daydream, fantasy, memory, nightmare, and pure imagination. More than a portrait of a Holocaust survivor's journey, it is a universal novel about recovering from the traumas of the past and finding a way to live again.
Praise for The Wall
"[A] majestic novel . . . Adler's prose is tidal, surge after narrative surge rushing forward and then enigmatically receding, the moment displaced by memory, and memory by introspective soliloquy." --Cynthia Ozick, The New York Times Book Review
"A towering meditation on the self and spirit . . . The writing is sonorous and so entirely devastating that the reader is compelled to pore over every word." -- Publishers Weekly (starred review)
"Masterful and utterly unique." --The Jerusalem Post
"Haunting and utterly heart-wrenching . . . a literary masterpiece." --Historical Novels Review
"An epic novel . . . an unforgettable portrait." --The Jewish Week
"[A] pensive portrait of a man struggling to find a place in the world after enduring transformative calamity . . . an eloquent record of suffering--and perhaps of redemption as well." -- Kirkus Reviews
Praise for H. G. Adler's novels The Journey and Panorama, translated by Peter Filkins
"Modernist masterpieces worthy of comparison to those of Kafka or Musil." -- The New Yorker
"Haunting . . . as remarkable for its literary experimentation as for its historical testimony." --San Francisco Chronicle , on Panorama
Author Notes
H. G. Adler was the author of twenty-six books of fiction, poetry, philosophy, and history. A survivor of Theresienstadt and Auschwitz, Adler later settled in England and began writing novels about his experience. Having worked as a freelance writer and scholar throughout his life, Adler died in London in 1988.
Peter Filkins is an acclaimed translator and poet and the recipient of a Berlin Prize fellowship in 2005 from the American Academy in Berlin, among other honors. He teaches writing and literature at Bard College at Simon's Rock in Great Barrington, Massachusetts, and translation at Bard College in Annandale-on-Hudson, New York.
Reviews (4)
Publisher's Weekly Review
This is Adler's third (posthumous) and final work in the Shoah trilogy (after The Journey and Panorama), one of the very few works of Holocaust fiction written by a survivor. The author, once a prisoner at Theresienstadt and three other concentration camps, crafted this modernist homage to his despair over the course of many years; it was first published in 1989. His protagonist, Arthur-most certainly Adler himself-is an exile in the "Metropolis," a thinly disguised London. He lives a bemused existence with his second wife, Joanna, and their two children, going through the motions of being a father, and indeed of being human. He has suffered something so dreadful that it is almost impossible to articulate, but it seems that his first wife perished in the war, as did his parents. In his dreams, which reflect in an absurdist way the real horror he faced, he returns to his father's haberdashery in Prague; sometimes his parents are still alive and sometimes they die before his very eyes. Neighbors recognize and pity Arthur, knowing more than he about the fate of his family. He reminisces or dreams about being taken in by friends he does not recollect, of interacting with scholarly colleagues in London, and of meeting his beloved Joanna, on whom he relies utterly as his only link to the world in which he now finds himself adrift. He also imagines witnessing his own death. The symbolic wall of the title is purported to be the past, but it is much more: an existential barrier made of pain that separates him from the rest of humanity. The past and the present are indistinguishable in the stream of Adler's consciousness, but this distracts very little from the story. The writing is sonorous and so entirely devastating that the reader is compelled to pore over every word. One cannot begin to share this author's anguish, but can participate in not allowing it to be forgotten. (Dec.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Kirkus Review
Pensive portrait of a man struggling to find a place in the world after enduring transformative calamity. "To write poetry after Auschwitz," wrote the German literary critic Theodore Adorno, "is barbaric." But what of those who lived through Auschwitz? Just to live, to say nothing of writing, is problematic. So thinks the protagonist of survivor Adler's novel, the last in a trilogy, the preceding two volumes of which were published out of order a half-century ago. There is the sheer guilt of being alive when so many died, and then there are the memories, the past that "hisses in my ears, causes horrible and sometimes also multiple sensations, pressing into me, lifting me, holding ready a thousand horrors." Arthur Landau has lived. At the beginning of the 1960s, he's living in London, beginning to trust his neighbors a little, even though he and his family are the definitive strangers: "[T]he few people who know something about us are no less than an hour away." The welcome trade-off, Landau says, is that no one bothers him, though the thought is always with him that he could just as easily disappear from the street with no one noticing or caring, as before. Landau's world is one of memories that sometimes become very realif only in his mind, though it's not always easy for him or for readers to distinguish the real from the imagined, as with his Dostoyevski-an encounter with an "Assessor of Sympathies." Landau's disconnection is more affecting, and more open to the reader's sympathy, than that of the protagonist of Elias Canetti's Auto-da-F, which has a similarly strident quality; Adler's novel has a Kafkaesque dimension as well, save that Landau has at least the saving grace of an understanding wife who does what she can to make him feel safe, or at least safer, in the world: "She was happy to see," Landau tells us, "that I had achieved a partial and tolerable sense of resignation." An eloquent record of sufferingand perhaps of redemption as well. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
New York Review of Books Review
OF HOMER we know nothing, of Jane Austen not enough, of Kafka more and more, sometimes hour by hour; and yet Achilles and Elizabeth Bennet and Joseph K. press imperially on, independent of their makers. Lasting works hardly require us to be acquainted with the lives of the masters who bore them - they have pulsing hearts of their own. Still, on occasion there emerges a tale that refuses to let go of its teller, that is unwilling, even in the name of art, to break free; or cannot. This is less a question of autobiographical influence or persuasion than of an uncanny attachment: call it a haunting, the relentlessly obsessive permeation of a book by its author. Or imagine a man condemned for the rest of his days to carry, and care for, and inconsolably preserve his own umbilical cord. In this way "The Wall," the final novel of an exilic trilogy by H. G. (Hans Günther) Adler, is inseparable from the lacerating fortunes of the writer's life; the chronicle he gave birth to continues to claim him. It matters, then, that Adler was reared in a linguistically fraught Prague, and that like Kafka before him, he was a Jew steeped culturally in German within a society vigorously Czech. At Charles University he studied musicology, but as poet, scholar, historian, philosopher with a theological bent, and novelist above all, he subsequently encompassed far more. Following the German onslaught in 1941, he and his family were, as we have learned to say, "deported" - a Nazi palliative, with its elevated aura of Napoleon on Elba, for violent criminal abduction. He endured two and a half years in Theresienstadt, and in 1944 was sent by freight car to Auschwitz, where his physician wife and her mother were promptly gassed. His parents and 16 relatives were similarly dispatched. Liberated in 1945, Adler returned to Prague, only to find it under rigid Soviet control. In 1947 he escaped to London, where, buffeted by the forlorn displacements of a melancholic exile, he nevertheless completed a comprehensive and searingly definitive sociological study of Theresienstadt. Arthur Landau, the voice and central consciousness of "The Wall," traces a nearly identical trajectory, but so powerfully and strangely transfigured as to drive history into unsettling phantasmagoria. Names and habitations are veiled: Prague is "over there," London is "the metropolis," Jews go unmentioned, Germans and their deathly devisings the same; yet grief and terror and wounding memory beat on, unappeased. And meanwhile, in his modest new household in an unprepossessing neighborhood of the metropolis, where he lives quietly with Johanna, his sympathetic second wife, and their two children, Landau is laboring over an immense work of historiography, "The Sociology of Oppressed People." He turns for support to an earlier wave of refugees from "over there," who by now are well situated either in business or as an established intellectual cohort. At first, remembering old friendships, they rally round him with bright promises of funding, then fail to follow through, until finally he is rawly rebuffed. The scholars disdain his ideas. The entrepreneurs scoff at his elitist impracticality, and offer inferior jobs in wallpaper and artificial pearls. "Unfortunately," he reflects, "I was too late. The time for refugees was past; they had all attached themselves to something or someone, and there was nothing left for foreigners.... I soon appreciated that there was one too many people in the world, and that was me. I simply couldn't be allowed to exist." Existence, often as plain-spoken as here, but more frequently mournfully eloquent, is the great clamor that tolls through the undulating passages of this wild-hearted novel. "I have ceased to exist," Landau laments, "called it quits, am completely spent, the vestige of a memory of who I no longer am.... I never even rise to the level of a dubious existence, the fragile bearing of a single nature, because I am homeless in every sense, belonging nowhere and therefore expendable, never missed." And again, in the voice of God to Adam: "You have eaten of the fruit; that cannot be undone. Your mistake is this: that you wish to exist; what's more, that you want to have done so from the very beginning and forevermore. You concern yourself much too intensely with that. Your will to be is inexhaustible." The will to be becomes manifest in grotesque scenes and gargoyle-like figures thrown up by intimations of an elusive history of atrocity. And always an insinuating image, in the guise of a wall, stalks and oppresses Landau, now representing the unremitting ache of exile and loss, now the anguished past (although no more than a single paragraph in more than 600 pages hints at the explicit reality of Auschwitz). Steadily encroaching, the wall is sometimes almost palpable, sometimes hidden. Even when it is absent, its influence is tormentingly theatrical, as when a pair of pallbearers come with a hearse to take Landau to be cremated. He refuses to go, though Johanna, out of courtesy, urges it, while politely inviting the pallbearers to eat breakfast with the family beforehand. When the two return at a later time, promising a trip to a sociological conference, Landau agrees to sit uncomfortably on top of the empty coffin while Johanna and the children follow the hearse in a neighbor's vegetable truck. The conference turns out to be a street fair organized in honor of Landau himself, where all his old scorners and adversaries are selling tickets to the booths and bumper cars. So it is that fantasy alternates with panic, and panic with sardonic realism. How to classify a work so circuitously and exhaustively structured? Adler's prose is tidal, surge after narrative surge rushing forward and then enigmatically receding, the moment displaced by memory, and memory by introspective soliloquy. In Peter Filkins's patiently loyal rendering, all these movements of telling and withdrawal are joined by smaller eddyings in the form of participle clauses that coat Adler's serpentine sentences with a Germanic otherness. The translator has also appended a list of dramatis personae accompanied by a chapter-by-chapter summary. Rather than a help, these additions are a disservice, as if this majestic novel could not breathe on its own. BUT IT DOES breathe, and with a secret knowledge of untrammeled capacities. Adler has the courage of his idiosyncratic art, and though "The Wall" has been acclaimed a modernist masterwork, it is perversely premodern in its lavish freedom to go whither it wills, and to ponder, and to linger, and to suffer felt experience to the lees. The ruined scenes of "over there" are visited again and again, the ghosts together with the remnant of the living. Landau, returned to his native city, searches for his father's shop and finds desolation. The apparitions who are his parents (his mother is seen sewing his shroud) shun him and drive him off. His old teacher, turning on him, reports him to the authorities. He toils in a museum of the doomed, collecting the cherished properties of a vanished population: paintings of family members, masses of abandoned prayer books. He is warmly befriended by Anna, the sister of a schoolmate who, like so many others, has not returned. Wandering with Anna along once familiar mountain trails, he remembers earlier excursions with the lost wife of his youth. And then the nervous flight across the border to attain, finally, the foreign metropolis. All this in disregard of sequential chronology; instead, time's elastic wooing, Now melting into Then, Then devouring Now. In his richly authoritative introduction, Filkins refers to "The Wall" and the two novels that precede it, "Panorama" and "The Journey," as Adler's Shoah trilogy. "However," he notes, "what is most often missing ... is particulars." And here is a poignant conundrum. Fifty years on, encountering a narrative frame made purposefully abstract, where cities go nameless and horrors are loosened from their history, who will have the means to recognize Landau's wall for what it is? Or, at so increased a distance from the Europe of the last century, will Adler's universe, lacking in identifiable specificity (Theresienstadt, Auschwitz, Nuremberg Laws, Wehrmacht, SS, abductions, gassings, shootings, refugees, survivors), have fallen by then into piteous yet anodyne myth? A name is in itself a concrete history; namelessness is erasure. Even so universalized an image as hell has a name. It is called hell. CYNTHIA OZICK is the author, most recently, of the novel "Foreign Bodies."
Library Journal Review
In what is now an extensive literature on the Holocaust, certain writers and their work have achieved iconic status, Adler among them. He was born in Prague and later interned in several camps during World War II, including Theresienstadt and Auschwitz. Having lost his wife and many members of his family before war's end, he eventually settled in London and wrote numerous books of fiction, philosophy, and history, most notably his "Shoah" trilogy, composed between 1948 and 1956. In this final volume in the trilogy (which includes Panorama and The Journey), the author continues drawing on his own experiences to recount the fictional life of survivor Arthur Landau, which unfolds in a metropolis apparently meant to mirror London and Prague. After war, exile, and intellectual isolation, Landau is finally able to achieve a measure of peace through love of his second wife and children. VERDICT In the introduction, masterly translator Filkins best characterizes the work by saying, "The novel's nonlinear plot at times make[s] it difficult to know just what is going on or how we end up in a certain locale or set of circumstances." This stream-of-consciousness style lends itself to a wordiness that will slow down the narrative considerably for some readers. Best recommended for large collections of literary treatments of the Holocaust and the lives of survivors. [See Prepub Alert, 6/8/14.]-Edward B. Cone, New York (c) Copyright 2014. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
