Darkenbloom
by Eva Menasse (trans. Charlotte Collins)
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Pub Date 21 Nov 2024 | Archive Date 8 Nov 2024
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Description
A panoramic novel of European history, by an internationally bestselling writer.
The whole truth, as the name implies, is the collective knowledge of all those involved. Which is why you can never piece it together again properly afterwards. Because a few of those who possessed a part of it are always already dead. Or lying, or their memories are bad.
It’s 1989, and in a small town on the Austria–Hungary border, nobody talks about the war; the older residents pretend not to remember, and the younger ones are too busy making plans to leave. The walls are thin, the curtains twitch, there is a face at every window, and everyone knows what they are not supposed to say.
But as thousands of East German refugees mass at the border, it seems that the past is knocking on Darkenbloom’s door.
Still, though, nobody talks about the war.
Until a mysterious visitor shows up asking questions.
Until townspeople start receiving threatening letters and even disappearing.
Until a body is found.
Darkenbloom is a sweeping novel of exiled counts, Nazis-turned-Soviet-enforcers, secret marriages, mislabelled graves, remembrance, guilt, and the devastating power of silence, by one of Austria’s most significant contemporary writers.
Advance Praise
‘Eva Menasse has produced a masterpiece … While none of these motifs that Eva Menasse invokes are new, it feels like you’re experiencing them here for the first time in Technicolor and Dolby Stereo. How does she do this? Entirely through language. And that is why Darkenbloom is a novel that will last … As a novel, Darkenbloom is both a gripping linguistic thrill and a thriller — a thriller about coming to terms with the past. Until the very end, you want to know who knew what, and what they covered up or hushed up. The way Eva Menasse spreads this information throughout the novel in such a way that every word dropped at the beginning is resolved at the end and the suspense grows page after page is absolutely masterful … Eva Menasse’s novel is a stroke of genius.’
DIE ZEIT
‘Darkenbloom stirs up, saddens, pulls you along — especially through its characters and is undoubtedly one of the most important books of this fall. Great.’
NDR
‘Not a reunification novel, nor a key novel: Eva Menasse’s new novel Darkenbloom is something better. In a bitterly comic way, it turns a historical event into the background of a small-town portrait in 1989 … But where is Darkenbloom's third master builder, besides God and the Devil, the novel’s author? She’s there just two sentences later in all her sarcasm: “You wish God could only see into the houses and not the hearts.” Only literature should dare to look into dark souls. Literature like this.”’
FAZ
Available Editions
| EDITION | Hardcover |
| ISBN | 9781914484407 |
| PRICE | £20.00 (GBP) |
| PAGES | 480 |
