The Game of Opposites
A Novel
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5.0 • 1 Rating
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- $4.99
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- $4.99
Publisher Description
In an unnamed country at the end of a world war, Paul Miller escapes from a labor camp, collapsing after a few hundred feet. Taken in by a young woman he learns to love, Paul decides to stay where he is, and, as the war ends, he marries, starts a family, and helps to rebuild the village. But Paul is inescapably haunted by his life before the war, by his time in the camp, and by the fact that the people who are now his friends ignored for years the horrors in their midst. So when the camp’s commander suddenly returns to the village, Paul finds himself forced to choose between vengeance and forgiveness. The Game of Opposites is a universal tale of good and evil, and a stunning evocation of the capability for both within us all.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Whitbread First Novel Award winner Lebrecht (for The Song of Names) stiffly examines the psychological and moral dilemmas of living in a post-Holocaust world. When Paul Miller stumbles out of a work camp in an unnamed European country, he is saved by Alice, who hides him in the attic of her family inn. He eventually takes up residence in the town and marries Alice. Paul is continually torn between his love for his wife and son, and the guilt he feels living in a place where he endured so much torment. When he's elected mayor, Paul creates plans to modernize the idyllic mountain town and bury his past, but then the former prison commandant returns, and Paul is conflicted: take revenge or move on with his life? This novel's exploration of the shades of good and evil is hobbled, however, by characters who feel shaped by what they were created to represent as opposed to the humanity that might exist in them. The overly allegorical feel keeps the reader at too much of a distance and flattens what could be compelling imagery and characters into symbols.
