Last house before the mountain A novel

Josef and Maria's family lives in poverty outside an Austrian village. They are known as Die Bagage, the riffraff. Josef's unlikely luck, Maria's excessive beauty, and their son Lorenz's abilities have villagers wagging fingers and nodding that "no one believed in witchcraft anymore, but you never knew." Josef is sent off to war and asks Mayor Fink to ensure that no men visit Maria in his absence. The mayor agrees, but begins to call on Maria himself, bearing gifts. When a wartime baby is born, Josef has doubts despite the mayor's assurances and the priest's failure to extract a confession. Maria's granddaughter narrates the tale, profiling family members and recounting episodes in their struggles as hungry outcasts. A visit to a Vienna art museum frames the story, when an old masterpiece by Bruegel the Elder speaks to her. It is filled with people dashing about, playing, laughing, whining, shrieking. She laughs, recognizing an uncanny resemblance to her family. Lauded author Helfer's retrospective telling, based on her own family, is translated from German by Davidson.

In Helfer's spare, subtle English-language debut, an Austrian family is transformed during WWI. Maria and Josef Moosbrugger raise their four children in the shadow of a mountain outside a village, where their neighbors deride their poverty and worry the beautiful Maria will have a corrupting effect on the local men. Shortly after Josef departs in 1914 for military service, the mayor swoops in with offers to provide the family with food--but only if Maria tolerates his caresses--and Maria meets Georg, a traveler from Germany, whose ruddy hair and expressive manner make him the antithesis of the dark, saturnine Josef. Maria resists the mayor, and the children almost starve, and though Georg visits Maria only a few times, they fall in love. When Maria becomes pregnant, the villagers blame Georg. Josef, however, had twice come home on leave before the pregnancy, and when he returns for good after the war, he refuses to look at or speak to Margarethe, the daughter he insists is not his. Helfer brings a great deal of nuance to her exploration of female desire and vulnerability, male power, and community division. This should win the author wider recognition in the U.S. Agent: Markus Hoffmann, Regal Hoffmann & Assoc. (Apr.)