However a novella can’t be everything at once, and ‘A Whole Life’ does give us the full life of a solid man living in the Austrian Alps. Andreas Egger never has to contend with his own Bad Nature. Perhaps it is a little too simple to be entirely realistic. Like the mountains, it is elemental and fatalistic. Its austere beauty gives ‘A Whole Life’ its power by concentrating on only those things that finally matter. His job is to clear the pathways for these cable-cars in the treacherous mountains. During his lifetime he watches his neighborhood change from a farming area to a tourist destination with cable-cars that take the visitors up to the top of the mountains. Later Andreas somehow overcomes his bad childhood and does all the things people do, gets a decent job working in the mountains, marries, serves a stint in the German army during World War II, comes back to the mountains. As still a young boy of four, Andreas is taken in by his uncle Kranzstocker who already has a family of his own and looks upon this little boy as an extra unwanted burden. This is the story of a man contending with the majestic beauty and the dark calamity of both Mother Nature and Human Nature.Īndreas is born to a woman who “had led an irresponsible life, for which God had recently punished her with consumption and summoned her to his bosom”. ‘A Whole Life’ by Robert Seethaler (2014) – 151 pages Translated from the German by Charlotte CollinsĪs its title says, this novella gives the reader a whole life, the life of Andreas Egger who lives almost his entire life in the Austrian Alps.
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