This was an enjoyable read and I would recommend it. thanks for letting me have an advance copy. I'm new to this author.

Thank you for the galley. Unfortunately, I could not read the book before it was archived.

Flashes of brilliance

Although I loved the premise and wanted to really like this book, but I did find this a bit disjointed and difficult to follow, however this is the first book I’ve read from this author and it sounds like I should have read the previous book.

There are some genuine flashes of brilliance here and it is worth a read.

I received this book for free from the publisher in exchange for an honest review. This does not affect my opinion of the book or the content of my review.

This is a continuation of the loose series that feature Carl and Emma Regendorf, a married couple living in Berlin during the Second World War. Carl is German and works in the Foreign Office under Adam von Trott, while Emma is a Dutch national. Carl is part of the resistance movement against Hitler and the Nazi regime that is leading Germany to complete destruction. It is the summer of 1944 and von Stauffenberg’s assassination attempt on Hitler has just failed. In the crackdown following this, both men are arrested and Emma has to hurriedly leave their relatively peaceful home in the Berlin suburb of Dahlem. Carl is executed by a vengeful regime, while Emma survives the War and makes a slow and painful return to her home country, to Gouda and then to Rotterdam, where she makes her home.
The story is narrated by Emma’s memories as a dying woman in her mid nineties, who is looking to make a dignified exit from her long life. She looks back on her life with both her husbands and, as always, the shadow of the War looms large and menacing over all who lived through it. Emma is unable to obliterate the War and her memories – instead learning to make them part of her life so that she can find some way to exist with a degree of meaning. This is a moving and engaging novel, intelligent and poignant – a pleasure to read.

“She was ninety-six years old, she had witnessed a century, and understood nothing at all.”

Emma Verweij is ninety-six and on the cusp of death. She’s lived on a street in Rotterdam since marrying Bruno after the Second World War. But she has another past – a past she hasn’t spoken of except in vague general terms. Before Bruno there was Carl, and Nazi Germany, and marriage to a man who opposed the regime, and died for his opposition. As Emma lies dying memories emerge, forming a bridge from past to present. This novel presents a mediation on memory, on time, on letting go, on the need to build a life, no matter what horrors the past holds.

Told dreamily, poetically, Emma’s past is revealed in spare, but poetic prose as the narrative moves from Emma’s youth to her present, marking time and making sense of time. As they lie together on what will be their last day, these poignant lines reveal what each know, somehow, and how, even when we know something vaguely, intuitively, the knowledge is there, creating a disturbing undercurrent of unease:

“What’s going to happen to our children now?”
Emma and Carl are lying naked, next to each other, on their backs, eyes open, hand in hand, it is four o’clock, just before the first birds wake. Carl turns to her and repeats her words, confused.
“Our children?” “I mean that they’ll never exist.”
“So you don’t think I was doing my best just now?”
He snorts with laughter, and so does Emma, in spite of the leaden weight of her words. They will never exist, it is a threat of the worst kind, a vision of the end. A last-ditch attempt to change fate? Something like that, yes.

Emma’s story is, on the surface, mundane. A woman who tries to forget her past, who merges into the present, marrying, having children, being a wife, being a mother, trying to become ordinary. And in a sense, she succeeds – but it’s her past that makes her interesting as a character, that drives the story. Ordinary – and yet symbolic of so many who have moved on from trauma, war, sadness, the loss of a first husband, hurrying, embracing the new.

A sensitive, well told story. At times the pace was a little too slow and contemplative; and at times I lost interest in Emma as an old woman ruminating in and out of consciousness, but the writing pulled me back:

“Vagueness piled on top of rumour and speculation, on dreams and suspicions: family history is a constant stream of knowing almost nothing, a scrap of insight here and there, an unintentional discovery. Those who find out and understand something do so by accident. The past is black, her parents’, and her own as well. No, it is not black, it is dark. Black suggests there is no solution, there is hopelessness in that word, maybe even dishonesty and deception. With “dark”, you cannot help thinking of a possible way out, that one day something might come to light.”

Short, spare and concise, this evocative and moving novel tells of the last night –the Longest Night of the title – of 96-year-old Emma, who, as the hours slowly pass, looks back over her eventful life from her time in Nazi Germany to her escape to Holland where she now lives. She’s waiting for her son to arrive before she can take the final step. She reflects on her loves and losses, the dangers of war-time Europe and the consolations of family and peace. The book meanders in time and space and is very episodic, reflecting Emma’s own thoughts, but sometimes making the narrative a bit too disjointed on occasion. Although it can be read as a stand-alone novel I was glad that I had read Otto de Kat’s earlier book The News form Berlin as I felt it helped me fill in on the detail and understand more of what Emma is thinking about and remembering. I very much enjoyed it on the whole but did feel the narrative could have been a bit tighter.

In Rotterdam it is Emma Verweij's last day. She is 96 years old and finally ready to die, but not before she thinks back over the loves and losses of her long life. Her fragmented reminiscences tell of her flight from Nazi Germany in the wake of the failed Von Stauffenberg assassination attempt, hiding in an isolated Black Forest village and her attempts to build a life in Holland.

For years she has tried to bury her memories of the war but now they are hard to ignore. Her story weaves between several different periods of her life so that her story only emerges only slowly and we learn about her family: her parents failed marriage, her husband's role in the war and the family she has managed to build in Rotterdam.

In a circuitous, unhurried narrative that effectively expresses both the disjointed state of Emma's failing thoughts and the way that our memories can creep up on us, thoughts of one event, one person sparking memories of another, years later. Emma approaches parts of her life indirectly, circling the more painful parts and offering small details until she is ready to face them more clearly.

It's a story infused with sadness and secrets and regret and the tone is a little distant but in a way that feels entirely appropriate for the end of a long life when one might finally be able to look back with some detachment. It's an abstracted, ephemeral piece of writing that feels deeply personal and addresses guilt, love and shells that we build to protect ourselves. To me this is the kind of story that the Gustav Sonata, which I read a few days earlier, aspired to be.

http://www.librarything.com/work/19174561

Also on Litsy at charl08

Emma is nearing the end of her long life, thinking back over its major events and the people closest to her. Many of these were the main characters in Otto de Kat’s previous novels ‘News from Berlin’ and ‘Julia’, for example, and I haven’t read these. This made it frustrating for me to try to read this book as a stand-alone. Theirs seemed to be more interesting stories than Emma’s. I wanted to learn more about Emma’s parents Oscar and Kate - Emma’s childhood recollections are just too incomplete and tantalising. I was equally fascinated by her husband Bruno’s relationship with Julia. I’ll have to read the earlier books.

One particular strength of this novel is its handling of the nature of memory. All the characters, including Emma herself, have been traumatised by war and in their different ways they all seek to put it behind them and try to forget. People and events are no longer spoken of, but they linger in the background. Little hints of previous lives surface from time to time, are not always explained, so cause anxiety and threaten what happiness has been achieved. We see some heartbreaking misunderstandings.

Concisely and elegantly written, and with great insight, I’d heartily recommend (though I’d also recommend reading his novels in sequence as I think that would give the reader a more satisfying experience).