The blurb on the back of Robert Seethaler’s
A Whole Life likens Andreas Egger to
John Williams’ Stoner, but he’s completely different. Stoner is an extremely depressing book because the title character
is a victim in every sense of the word. Stoner is at the mercy of an academic
system that has no care for intellectual values and commitment to his students.
He is bullied by the colleague who self-promotes and politics his way to the
role of department chair. Stoner marries the wrong woman, and having grown up
in a small town in Ohio, he adopts middle-American morality that keeps him tied
to her for life. And he doesn’t have the social ability to confront, or better,
escape his oppressor. He may not be integrated into the university, but he is
in it, a part of that world, and he cannot get away from his circumstances.
Stoner is trapped. Andreas Egger in A
Whole Life is not.
We all fall in love with Andreas Egger
because he is joyous and expresses wonder at the world. Stoner is perhaps a
little too close to my own life for comfort, so I find him depressing. By
contrast, there’s a part of me wants to be Egger. No matter how brutal and
unfair the world into which he is born, Egger has in him a love of life, a
habit of looking out into the universe and seeing its magic. Even as he is violently
beaten by a step father, or sent to the farthest outpost of a Russian POW camp
in an environment that makes the climatic conditions in the Austrian Alps of
his hometown seem tropical by comparison, he finds solace and welcomes
acceptance of his situation. Likewise, Andreas Egger doesn’t care what anyone
else thinks of him. Egger never suffers for the sake of social mores, and he certainly
doesn’t adhere to any conventions. Egger is the best worker hired by the
company who builds the first cable car on the mountain, he toils in the fields,
has calluses and scars all over his hands, his gammy leg is like a piece of
wood he carries around with him for a lifetime, he is put in a box by the Russians,
but he doesn’t really care what others think of him. The experience that lasts
the longest in his mind is one of the shortest in his life: his love for Marie,
a young woman who works at the local pub. And through all this, he has very
little money, usually one pair of pants and at most a cup and a plate as his
worldly possessions. As a young man he buys a plot of land that is so high up
the mountain vegetation can’t grow. It is lost not long after he buys it by an
avalanche that also kills his beloved Marie and their child. But Egger thinks
“things had not gone so badly after all.”
We fall in love with Egger for the expanse
of his heart and his mind, even though he leaves the village only twice in his
life: once to go to war and the second time on a bus at the end of his life,
just for the sake of leaving. The vastness of the universe through Andreas
Egger’s eyes is shown in his understanding and harmony with the natural
environment. He can bear the ice cold because it is as if he has always been out
in the cold, he can toil for hours because he has a sense of self to match, and
when he looks to the stars at the end of a day, he thinks that life is filled
with infinite possibility. The promise is in the stars.
There are some magical moments in Egger’s
life. As is often the case with a character who doesn’t leave his small
community, wonder comes to him. A worker loses an arm that he must bury, a
man’s body is preserved in ice for forty years, and when the body reappears it
is like a freak in a sideshow. The coming of television is exquisitely handled
by Seethaler. In the middle of his violent stepfather’s funeral, Egger hears a
child’s laughter.
“One of the
windows was ajar and flickering brightly. The landlord’s little son was sitting
in the room in front of an enormous television set, his face right up against
the screen. The reflection of the images danced across his forehead; he was
clutching the antenna with one hand and slapping his thighs with the other as
he laughed. He was laughing to hard that through the curtain of rain Egger
could make out the glistening drops of spittle spraying against the box.”
He thinks about stopping, but quietly
decides to continue the procession. When Egger proposes to Marie, he organizes
for her name to be written in fire across the mountain that is his home. In one
of the most tender and yet tense moments in the book, Egger comes face to face
with a Red Army soldier. The two
soldiers, in the snow, no one and nothing else between them, their mutual
respect and simultaneous disinterest in each other reveals the triumph of human
nature over war. There is no question of what to do with the enemy; they let
each other live.
Lastly, given my blog about the joys of
spare writing, it’s worth saying that this is a novel of 148 pages that sees the
unfolding of an entire lifetime. And it’s a lifetime that is full and rich,
complicated by heartbreak and persecution, as much as by love and joy. I read
the book in English, so I say with some reservation, that the economy of
language is the necessary mirror for Andreas Eger’s reluctance to speak. One of
the people he meets on his journey tells Egger that those who talk don’t listen.
And it's as though this book asks us to listen, just for a brief time, to its
wisdom.
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