The Right Hand of Sleep
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- £5.99
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- £5.99
Publisher Description
Oskar Voxlauer is in flight from his past - from his bourgeois Austrian upbringing; from horrific memories of fighting on the Italian Front in 1917; and from the twenty years he has spent in the Ukraine watching his Bolshevik ideals crumble and the physical decline of the woman who taught him about love.
In 1938, he finally returns to the small Austrian town of his birth where his mother is waiting to greet a son she hasn't seen since he was a boy.
But, despite Oskar's attempts to live a reclusive existence as a gamekeeper up in the hills, he cannot escape the tensions that are threatening the tranquil town of Niessen. When Hitler marches into Austria and the Blackshirts come to the valley.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
The ghost hovering over this assured and astonishingly mature first novel is that of Joseph Roth, the great interwar Austrian novelist. Perhaps this reflects Wray's own double origin, as the son of an Austrian father and an American mother. Oskar Voxlauer, Wray's Austrian protagonist, was a teenage deserter from the Austro-Hungarian army in WWI. As the novel begins, he is returning to his native village, Niessen bei Villach, in 1938, after a 19-year stay in the Ukraine. His Russian lover's death has released him, and he is coming back in the middle of Hitler's Anschluss to see his lonely mother. To escape the tensions in Niessen, Oskar goes to work as a gamekeeper on a stretch of forest his Jewish tavernkeeper friend Ryslavy owns outside town. There he meets the old gamekeeper's daughter, Else Bauer, who lives under a vague cloud, having borne a daughter out of wedlock. The two are briefly happy together, but then Else's cousin, Kurt, returns to Austria from exile in Germany, as the head of the Nazis in Niessen. Kurt is also, Oskar quickly discovers, more to Else than a cousin. Oskar publicly opposes the Nazis; Kurt ambiguously patronizes him. Soon the triangle between Else, Oskar and Kurt becomes fraught with menace. The gloom of the dark days of late '30s Austria is heightened by Oskar's recollections of personal trauma: his wartime experiences; the suicide of his father, a famous opera composer; and the brutal collectivization of the Ukrainian countryside. Wray's first novel displays psychological acuity, a mastery of dialogue and an unfailing historical empathy, and should garner deserved raves.
