A Whole Life

(Paperback)

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SHORTLISTED FOR THE MAN BOOKER INTERNATIONAL PRIZE 2016 The 200,000-copy German bestseller "No praise is too high for A Whole Life. Its daunting beauty lingers. This is a profound, wise and humane novel that no reader will forget." Irish Times Andreas lives his whole life in the Austrian Alps, where he arrives as a young boy taken in by a farming family. He is a man of very few words and so, when he falls in love with Marie, he doesn't ask for her hand in marriage, but instead has some of his friends light her name at dusk across the mountain. When Marie dies in an avalanche, pregnant with their first child, Andreas' heart is broken. He leaves his valley just once more, to fight in WWII - where he is taken prisoner in the Caucasus - and returns to find that modernity has reached his remote haven... Like John Williams' Stoner or Denis Johnson's Train Dreams, A Whole Life is a tender book about finding dignity and beauty in solitude. An exquisite novel about a simple life, it has already demonstrated its power to move thousands of readers with a message of solace and truth. It looks at the moments, big and small, that make us what we are. Translated by Charlotte Collins. PRAISE FOR A WHOLE LIFE "Heart-rending and heart-warming . . . for all its gentleness, a very powerful novel." Jim Crace "Seethaler renders a life at once ordinary and exquisite, exploring the vagaries of solitude with a gentle humility." Times Literary Supplement "What is perhaps most remarkable about this remarkable novel is the way that it continually weaves past, present and future into a single fabric." Sunday Times "It takes barely two hours to read it but would take a lifetime to forget." Graham Robb "Genuine wisdom and restrained poetry . . . Charlotte Collins' translation is a great triumph." Sunday Telegraph "From its first sentence, Seethaler grips you with a quiet matter-of-factness as he delineates with a suitably spare beauty the life of woodsman Andreas Egger." Independent on Sunday

Reviews

Robert Seethaler's quietly mesmerizing novel - elemental in both tone and subject - shows what joy and nobility can be found in a life of hardship, patience and bereavement. It is at once heart-rending and heart-warming. A Whole Life, for all its gentleness, is a very powerful book. -- Jim Crace
Against the backdrop of a literary world that often seems crowded with novels yelling "Look at me!", it's refreshing to read a story marked by quiet, concentrated attention . . . Seethaler's scenes of mountain life are realised with spare, almost surreally vivid images. But what is perhaps most remarkable about this remarkable novel is the way that it continually weaves past, present and future into a single fabric. -- Adam Lively * Sunday Times *
Robert Seethaler's novel is, like its hero, short on words but in its 150 pages manages to do exactly what it says on the tin: embrace a whole life... It's an unremarked existence, told in simple prose, of a simple man that magically captures the universal in all our lives. A slim masterpiece. * Daily Mail *
A Whole Life is a lovely contemplation of a life in solitude in a remote valley, into which the modern world slowly intrudes. -- Ian McEwan * Sunday Times *
Now another of these special, calm narratives that penetrate the joy and grief, the tiny comforts of being alive and the experiences which shape an individual has arrived . . . As haunting and as spare as Stoner. It has been sensitively and astutely translated into English by Charlotte Collins . . . a gentle, tender work devoid of sentimentality yet so evocative and moving . . . No praise is too high for A Whole Life. Its daunting beauty lingers. This is a profound, wise and humane novel that no reader will forget. -- Eileen Battersby * Irish Times *
Seethaler renders a life at once ordinary and exquisite, exploring the vagaries of solitude with a gentle humility. * Times Literary Supplement *
It takes barely two hours to read it but would take a lifetime to forget. -- Graham Robb
Genuine wisdom and restrained poetry . . . Charlotte Collins' translation is a great triumph. * Sunday Telegraph *
From its first sentence, Seethaler grips you with a quiet matter-of-factness as he delineates with a suitably spare beauty the life of woodsman Andreas Egger. * Independent on Sunday *
A perfect, warm, moving antidote to, well, pretty much everything thats going on in the world . . . That this gentle-paced tale encompasses such a large timespan in the space of barely 160 pages is testament to Seethalers pared-down writing style, beautifully rendered by the books translator Charlotte Collins. * New European *

Author Bio

Robert Seethaler is an Austrian living in Berlin and is the author of four previous novels. He also works as an actor, most recently in Paolo Sorrentino's La Grande Bellezza.