Review by Booklist Review
Austrian-born actor and novelist Seethaler delivers a slender, meditative novel about nature, love, and simple living. Born around the dawn of the twentieth century, Andreas Egger has spent his entire life in a rural, alpine village, where he roams the mountains. Forced to live with an abusive relative as a child, Egger has had a limp ever since and now rarely speaks. Though most people would consider his hobbling a handicap, ever-resilient and optimistic Egger uses it as an advantage as he traverses the uneven, snowy mountain landscape. He has embraced a life of struggle, even building a tiny home on a craggy plot of land high above the village. When at last he falls in love and takes up work clearing trees for a new cable car, his perception of the mountain begins to change, and survival takes on a new meaning as the reality of war sweeps in. A tender and moving look at the human capacity for adaptation, Seethaler's understated tale is a reminder that joy can be found in daily toils and simple pleasures.--Fullmer, Jonathan Copyright 2016 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
The life chronicled in Seethaler's poignant novel is, at first glance, unremarkable: Andreas Egger begins and ends his life in an Alpine valley village, where he arrives after his mother's death in 1902, and to which he returns in 1951, after years as a POW in Russia. Egger, however, contains multitudes: subjected to childhood beatings that leave him with a permanent limp, he stands up to his abusive uncle and goes on to become an expert cable-car company employee, as well as a devoted husband and father. But the mountainous land he loves-and through which, in his middle age, he leads groups of hiking tourists-is far from serene. The titanic forces of nature and politics determine Egger's arduous course through the 20th century. Not always successfully, Seethaler seeks to avoid sentimentality. Readers will discover in his contained prose a vehicle for keen insight and observation: Egger, touched for the first time by his future wife, experiences "a very subtle pain... more profound than any [he] had encountered," and later, watching the Moon landing with his neighbors in their new parish hall, he feels "mysteriously close and connected to the villagers down here on the darkened Earth." Nearing his end, Egger "couldn't remember where he had come from, and ultimately he didn't know where he would go. But he could look back without regret... with a full-throated laugh and utter amazement." (Sept.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
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