The Search for Heinrich Schlögel: A Novel
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- $11.99
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
Brimming with the creativity behind David Mitchell's masterpiece Cloud Atlas in a far north setting, The Search for Heinrich Schlogel is a sophisticated story with magical underpinnings.
Martha Baillie’s hypnotic novel follows Heinrich Schlögel from Germany to Canada, where he sets out on a solo hike into the interior of Baffin Island. His journey quickly becomes surreal; he experiences strange encounters and inexplicable visions. Time plays tricks on him. When he returns to civilization, he discovers that, though he has not aged, thirty years have passed. Narrated by an unnamed archivist who is attempting to piece together the truth of Heinrich’s life, The Search for Heinrich Schlogel dances between reality and fantasy. Heinrich’s story, as it unfolds, in today’s disappearing North, asks us to consider our role in imagining the future into existence while considering the consequences of our past choices. Brimming with the creativity behind David Mitchell’s masterpiece Cloud Atlas in a far north setting, The Search for Heinrich Schlogel is a sophisticated story with magical underpinnings.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In the latest from Baillie (The Incident Report), written in beautiful prose, 20-year-old Heinrich Schl gel 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.
