A Whole Life (Ein ganzes Leben) Robert Seethaler Charlotte Collins (translation) by Robert Seethaler, Charlotte Collins (translation) 9781487000752, 1487000758, B015YM4CMA instant download after payment.

Originally published in German 2014 as Ein ganzes Leben by Hanser Berlin, an imprint of Carl Hanser Verlag, Munich

Robert Seethaler’s tender book about finding dignity & beauty in solitude looks at the moments, big & small, that make us who we are. 

Translated by Charlotte Collins.

Andreas, a young orphan, is taken in by a farming family in the Austrian Alps. He grows up to be a man of few words. When Andreas falls in love with Marie, instead of proposing he lights her name at dusk across the mountain. When Marie dies in an avalanche, pregnant with their first child, his heart is broken. He leaves his valley just once more, to fight in World War One - where he is taken prisoner in the Caucasus. When he returns, he finds that the modern world has reached his remote haven.

"This short, unadorned novel has something monumental about it, like a small mountain. It's reminiscent in different ways of Gerbrand Bakker's The Twin & Willy Vlautin's Lean on Pete, a more optimistic & less brutal work than either, but with the same understated realism. Yet with its dramatic European alpine landscapes & its looming central figure, empathetically but never sentimentally drawn, it also has the feel of a folk tale."  -  Kerryn Goldsworthy, The Sydney Morning Herald

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Robert Seethaler is an Austrian writer living in Berlin. He is the author of four previous novels, including The Tobacconist, which was a German bestseller with more than 200,000 copies in print. A Whole Life is his first work to be translated into English. He also works as an actor, most recently in Paulo Sorrentino’s La Grande Bellezza.