Austrian novelist Robert Seethaler's A Whole Life features a protagonist, Andreas Egger, whose life on first glance appears destined to be incomplete. Andreas has reasons to fall into a life of resentful victimhood. But in a triumph of human resilience, and acceptance, Andreas fashions a life well-lived against the backdrop of the Austrian Alps, which inspire both fear and awe.
After his mother dies of consumption, four-year-old Andreas is taken to his mother's surviving brother-in-law, Hubert Kranzstocker, a farmer in the mountain foothills. Kranzstocker, a religious fanatic, feels that taking in an unwanted child gives him the liberty of disciplining Andreas by whipping him with a hazel rod on his bare buttocks for any infraction: “spilt milk, moldy bread, a lost cow or an evening prayer wrongly stammered."
After one whipping, Andreas suffers a broken bone in his pelvis, which is set by a bonesetting neighbor, but leaves Andreas with a permanently crooked leg. When Andreas is eighteen and fully grown, Kranzstocker tries to abuse Andreas one more time, and Andreas replies, "If you hit me, I will kill you."
At last, Andreas becomes his own man, independent, and taking odd jobs to support himself. What he lacks in ease of movement, he makes up for with a willingness to outwork any man on the mountain.
A company comes to the mountain village to build a cable car to ascend the mountain. Andreas soon becomes the star employee. "Andreas was considered a cripple, but he was strong. He was a good worker, didn't ask for much, barely spoke, and tolerated the heat in the fields as well as the biting cold in the forest. He took on any kind of work and did it reliably and without grumbling ... He scarcely spent a single night in a bed; usually he slept on hay, in attics, in small side rooms, and in barns, alongside the cattle."
With such loving detail, Seethaler captures a triumphant life. Seethaler has said his own disability--blindness since childhood--gave him the compassion to create the character of Andreas Egger.
Always looming in the background of this novel is the mountain. It lifts Andreas' spirit as surely as it tests his resilience. He endures blinding snow storms and an epic avalanche.
Although Andreas will lose the love of his life, Marie, to an avalanche; although he will spend years of his life fighting for Germany in Russia and be captured as a POW; although he will grow too old for strenuous work; his life in whole is a testament to a durable and unalloyed purity of character.
A Whole Life by Robert Seethaler, translated by Charlotte Collins. Anansi Press, Inc., Toronto 2015. eISBN 978-1-4870-0074-5
Image credit: irishtimes.com
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