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Summary
Summary
A San Francisco Chronicle Best Book of the Year
The Empire of the Senses is an enthralling tale of love and war, duty and self-discovery. It begins in 1914 when Lev Perlmutter, an assimilated German Jew fighting in World War I, finds unexpected companionship on the Eastern Front; back at home, his wife Josephine embarks on a clandestine affair of her own. A decade later, during the heady, politically charged interwar years in Berlin, their children--one, a nascent Fascist struggling with his sexuality, the other a young woman entranced by the glitz and glamour of the Jazz Age--experience their own romantic awakenings. With a painter's sensibility for the layered images that comprise our lives, this exquisite novel by Alexis Landau marks the emergence of a writer uniquely talented in bringing the past to the present.
Author Notes
Alexis Landau is a graduate of Vassar College. She received her MFA from Emerson College and her PhD in English Literature and Creative Writing from the University of Southern California. This is her first novel. Alexis lives with her husband and her two children in Santa Monica, California.
Reviews (4)
Publisher's Weekly Review
The clashing forces of nationalism and romantic love wage war in Landau's vivid but uneven debut novel. Lev Perlmutter, successful businessman, German citizen, and assimilated Jew, volunteers to fight for Germany in the first World War, mainly to earn the respect of his gentile wife, Josephine, and her elitist family. Stationed near Riga, his experiences of war's horror and deprivation are tempered by a passionate affair with a local Jewish woman, Leah, whose earthiness and humor are a beguiling contrast to Josephine's icy perfection. Yet inevitably Lev must return to Berlin, where the Nazi Party's gradual rise to power forms the backdrop for the Perlmutters' own family drama: Josephine's obsession with psychoanalysis, son Franz's fearful overcompensation for his homosexuality, and daughter Vicki, stylish and rebellious, who stumbles into an unlikely connection with her father's wartime affair with Leah. Landau evokes the Weimar Republic era with spellbinding detail and nuance, deftly capturing the zeitgeist in the characters' colorful pursuits-jazz clubs, a nudist colony, a séance. Lev's struggle with his Jewish identity is also fascinating, as his nationalist countrymen and Old World friends each challenge his loyalty to the faith. Yet when Lev's past catches up with him at last, the pieces fall into place much too perfectly, dulling the novel's shine. The dream fades and the mechanics are revealed-an allegory for the era, but one the reader could do without. Agent: Alice Tasman, Jean V. Naggar Literary Agency. (Mar.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Booklist Review
*Starred Review* A top-notch literary saga with a gripping plotline, Landau's debut explores the complex questions of loyalty and ethnic identity in its depiction of a mixed-faith family living through social change during WWI and late 1920s Berlin. Lev Pearlmutter and his gentile wife, Josephine, have a strained relationship even before he enlists. When he returns, having been emotionally transformed by his service in a close-knit Russian village, he has more reason to regret his marriage, but he loves his two children, Franz and Vicki. Lev always considers himself more German than Jewish, and by 1927, they are a family of affluence that mixes well in society, or so it seems. However, disconnection from their heritage affects each of the Pearlmutters differently. Even as anti-Semitic sentiment increases, ebullient Vicki is romantically drawn to a Jewish man. For Franz, a repressed gay man desperate for belonging, generational rebellion manifests itself in a particularly insidious way. Each perfectly crafted individual is fully involved in the surrounding world. In Landau's hands, even a simple trip to the barber, in which Lev muses on his own and the country's problems, becomes meaningful and illustrative of the novel's themes. The characters' actions and thoughts are so three-dimensionally human that readers may forget they're reading fiction and not experiencing their real lives alongside them.--Johnson, Sarah Copyright 2015 Booklist
Kirkus Review
This first novel follows one family through two wars, four romances and one death with enough thought and craft to remain several shelves above the potboiler section. Lev Pearlmutter, a Jew with Eastern European roots who lives a financially comfortable life in Berlin with a German gentile wife, wants to escape "the shadowy presence of another past, another history"i.e., his Jewishness. Yet after he joins up at the war's outbreak in 1914 and leaves for the Eastern front, he soon falls in love with Leah, a poor, beautiful Jewish Russian peasant. She haunts him when he's back in Berlin after a relatively easy war, but it's only when her nephew arrives in the city and falls in love with Lev's daughter, Vicki, that the possibility of a reunion arises. Meanwhile, Lev's son, Franz, has grown interested in the clothing-optional men's nature camps that foster the Brown Shirts and make it difficult for the young man to conceal his homosexuality. Lev's wife, Josephine, risks tilting the book into bodice-ripping territory in the hot and heavy moments she spends with her therapist. The rising Nazism has a fair number of targets in this one family, and Landau derives much of the novel's meager tension from the reader's certainty about what the characters only suspect: That it's not a good time or place to be Jewish, gay or ambivalent. The author's sense of history is strong in scenes of well-chosen detail, whether in village or city. At the same time, her World War I is largely bloodless, and WWII passes by in a few mentions and pagesa shadowy presence indeed. Landau's talents suggest she might do well with a more directly historical novel, but she has produced some strong characters in this highly readable, oddly sanitized look at assimilation and its discontents. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Library Journal Review
This highly ambitious first novel by an author currently working on a PhD in English literature and creative writing sweeps us from a village on the Eastern Front during World War I to postwar Jewish settlements in Palestine and Buenos Aires, while the main story unfolds in Berlin, with World War II on the horizon. Though in one respect a historical saga, the work is especially an intimate look at the four members of the Pearlmutter family. Lev, a successful Jewish merchant, longs for Leah, whom he met at the front, while his marriage seems to have lost all appeal for his aristocratic, gentile wife, Josephine. Son Franz is both politically and sexually confused and makes bad choices that lead to disaster. Rebellious yet fashionable daughter Vicki falls in love with a young Jew from Aunt Leah's village who miraculously materializes in Berlin with news of his aunt. VERDICT Told with a wealth of detail, the novel seems to transpire in real time; the pace here is stately but engaging. Recommended for those who enjoy stories of this time period and, more broadly, those that deal with age-old human emotions and dilemmas against a foreign backdrop.-Edward B. Cone, New York (c) Copyright 2015. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Excerpts
Excerpts
1 The Eastern Front, August 1914 At first, the men were drunk off the euphoria of leaving Berlin, dreaming of virgin battlefields, singing and sharing flasks of whiskey when night fell. But Lev could not join in, blocked by a numb indifference that had settled over him as he observed the others with a clinical eye, picking apart their features, imagining how grotesque some of these men would appear if he sketched them asleep, their open mouths inviting flies. Yes, he'd volunteered when war was announced--but that day, only two days ago, already appeared fantastical, full of heated parades and brass bands, too much drink, his oxford shirt sticking to his chest in the humid air, and Josephine, waiting for him at home in the shaded courtyard, clutching her hat in her hands. She'd nearly ruined it, the one with the velvet flowers. He gently took it away from her and explained how he'd volunteered, to ensure he'd be called up first, to ensure no one would accuse him of shirking. He had said no one darkly because they both knew whom he meant--her mother and father, her brother, her whole Christian family, who despised him because he was a Jew. Even after seven years of marriage, seven biblical years, they hated him. Josephine had blinked back tears, mumbling something about how perhaps a shortage of equipment would delay his leave. No, no, he said. It wouldn't. "And where did you hear that, about lack of equipment?" "Marthe." He suppressed a laugh. "Still consulting your housemaid on such matters?" She shrugged. Lev nodded, trying to sympathize, but really, procuring information from Marthe? Large bumbling Marthe, who, although she expertly ironed the bedsheets and brought in afternoon tea at three o'clock sharp, never forgetting the lemon wedges, knew nothing of military matters. Josephine brushed a hair out of her eyes. "But why must you go directly?" Here she was, acting like a girl of eighteen when at twenty-five she had already suffered the agonies of childbirth, twice, giving him Franz and then Vicki. The children were asleep, napping in the nursery. Soon Marthe would wake them. He pushed away the thought of their warm sleepy bodies, of how they clung to him when they woke, as if he might slip away, as if they had already dreamed this. Tonight, Lev would explain his departure to Franz, who, at six, would understand, and Vicki, only four, who might not. After he went, Josephine would weave a grand story they could all believe, a story repeated over dinner and again at bedtime. A story that would lessen the blow of his absence. Was she capable? Or would she become so wrapped in her own sorrow, the tale would not hold? He must tell her what to say, exactly how to phrase it, so the children would understand why he had evaporated, like the receding condensation on the bathroom mirror Franz traced his finger through after Lev's daily shave, drawing a gun with his pinky. He looked at her face. Admiral-blue eyes, as if spun from colored glass. The delicate bridge of her nose framed by high cheekbones. Her arched eyebrows the color of wheat, which now drew together in worry. Please tell them a good story, he thought. "But we still have some time?" He inhaled sharply. "I'm leaving tomorrow. On the three o'clock transport train." Saying tomorrow made his heart pound, for her and for him. Too soon. So little time. He wondered if she would let him inside her tonight, their last night. On special occasions, she proved more compliant. Tonight, he thought, was a special occasion. The thought of her turning away, saying her head hurt, flashing that half-apologetic smile, infuriated him. He stared down at his lace-up oxfords. Scuffed tips. Should take them in, he thought. No point--tomorrow he'd be gone. He pictured his empty shoes standing in his dark closet, perfectly in line with the other pairs. Josephine touched his arm. "What are you thinking?" The courtyard's uneven stones made their chairs lean slightly off kilter, and for a moment, it looked as if she might slide off. "My shoes are scuffed." "What?" she said. How afraid should he feel of war? The question burned. But it didn't matter how much fear he felt or didn't feel--he was already in it, signed up and registered. And desertion promised death. They made sure everyone understood that. "How can you think of shoes, of all things? You'll be gone by nightfall tomorrow and you don't even know how to hold a gun." He detected a hint of malice in her voice, as if he should know how to hold a gun properly, like her brother did, from shooting pheasant in Grunewald forest. But Lev had grown up in the city. Never touched a gun in his life. Never killed, not even a deer or a bird. Jews don't hunt, he remembered his mother saying. Nor do they ride horses, sail, swim, fight in duels, or drink. And he remembered thinking: What do Jews do then? All the valiant heroic activities were reserved for gentiles. For men like Josephine's brother, Karl von Stressing, who taunted Lev with his gray-and-white dappled steed as he trotted through the Tiergarten, with his saber and his hunting rifle and his tall black boots. But now they were both privates enlisted in the German army, both fighting for Germany, both shooting and killing and then afterward, drinking in the trenches. Lev already tasted the vodka, clear and pure and burning in his throat. "How will you learn in time?" Josephine asked, more gently. "Training's in the barracks close to the front, for four weeks, and then we'll be sent off into the jaws of Hell," he said, realizing how flat it sounded. "Please don't say that." "I'm sorry." He looked into her watery light eyes. "Back by Christmas. I promise." When his mouth closed in on that word, promise, Lev knew it was a lie. ... Excerpted from The Empire of the Senses: A Novel by Alexis Landau All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.
