Lost
A Novel
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4.0 • 1 Rating
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- $8.99
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- $8.99
Publisher Description
Not since The Reader has a work of fiction so stunningly evoked the guilt and shame that resounds in postwar Germany. In this debut novel of astonishing originality, we bear witness to a family ravaged with regret at the loss of their child.
As a young boy, the narrator learns that his parents lost their firstborn son while fleeing the advancing Russian Army in 1945. Though his family has comfortably settled in Westphalen, the memory of Arnold continues to haunt them. The narrator shares his parents' anguish, but he can't resist feeling resentful, for his brother's absence is the most defining aspect of his life. When his parents learn of a foundling that resembles Arnold, they embark on a horrific quest to claim him as their own, only to endure a series of unanticipated twists that lead to a startling denouement. At turns uncanny, subtle, and perversely amusing, Lost is a chilling novel of mesmerizing power.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
A missing child casts a long shadow over his younger brother's existence in this slim, astringent first novel by German poet and professor Treichel, enthusiastically received upon its German publication in 1998. Thrust into a stranger's arms in a moment of terror and confusion during the Russian advance on Germany during WWII, baby Arnold disappears without a trace. His petit bourgeois mother and father never quite recover from the loss, though they make a new life for themselves in a small town in Westphalia and have another son. Stifled by his brother's ghostly presence ("my undead brother had the leading role in the family and had assigned me a supporting part"), this unnamed second child, the book's young narrator, is dragged unwillingly into his parents' all-encompassing search for Arnold. The search narrows to focus on "foundling 2307" in a Red Cross facility, who is reported to bear an almost exact resemblance to the narrator. But before foundling 2307 can be viewed in person, a prior relationship must be indicated, and a bureaucratic odyssey of blood tests, fingerprinting, cranial comparisons and official reports ensues. The narrator, caught between his distraught mother and his irritable father, a work-obsessed meat and sausage wholesaler, rebels silently, unmoved even when his father suffers a fatal heart attack upon returning from a final series of tests to discover that his cold-storage shed has been ransacked. The deadpan humor of the boy's observations and the absurdist quality of the proceedings compete evocatively with the novel's real traumas, and the final scene, which abruptly turns the emotional tables, casts new light on all that has gone before. Treichel's finely tuned prose moves at high velocity in a continuous text virtually bare of paragraphs and chapters. It is well served by Janeway's English translation, as the novel ticks from beginning to end like expert, ominous clockwork, measuring out blackly comedic alienation against the bleak backdrop of postwar Germany.
