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Hubert Mingarelli’s books include Quatre soldats (Four Soldiers), which won the Prix de Médicis. He lives in Grenoble. Sam Taylor is a translator, novelist, and journalist. His translated works include Laurent Binet’s award-winning HHhH. His own novels have been translated into ten languages.
A Meal in Winter: A Novel of World War II
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ISBN-13:
9781620971741
- Publisher: New Press, The
- Publication date: 07/05/2016
- Sold by: Barnes & Noble
- Format: eBook
- Pages: 144
- Sales rank: 203,255
- File size: 626 KB
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One morning in the dead of winter, during the darkest years of World War II, three German soldiers head out into the frozen Polish countryside. They have been charged by their commanders with tracking down and bringing back for execution “one of them”—a Jew. Having flushed out a young man hiding in the woods, they decide to rest in an abandoned house before continuing their journey back to the camp. As they prepare food, they are joined by a passing Pole whose virulent anti-Semitism adds tension to an already charged atmosphere. Before long, the group’s sympathies begin to splinter when each man is forced to confront his own conscience as the moral implications of their murderous mission become clear.
Called “masterly and necessary” by the Times Literary Supplement, A Meal in Winter recalls the claustrophobia of Roman Polanski’s The Pianist and Louis Begley’s Wartime Lies. A sleeper hit in the United Kingdom, this is the first novel by the award-winning French novelist Hubert Mingarelli to be translated into English.
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The New York Times - John Williams
…stark and profound…Mingarelli allows us to see kernels of genuine sympathy in his soldiers without ever denying the fear and malice they must indulge to do their jobs.Publishers Weekly
★ 03/21/2016In Mingarelli’s brief, haunting novel, his first translated into English, three German soldiers—Emmerich, Bauer, and an unnamed narrator—all emotionally damaged by their role in executing Jewish prisoners on behalf of the Third Reich, request permission to search the Polish countryside for outliers. “We explained to him that we would rather do the hunting than the shootings,” the narrator reports of a discussion with their commander. “We told him we didn’t like the shootings.” On patrol in freezing cold the next morning, the soldiers discover a young Jew hiding in an underground warren and begin the slog back to the barracks with him in tow. On the way, they stop at an unused house for a meal of soup, during which a Pole and his dog arrive. The dynamic among the men shifts as the soldiers try to glean the Pole’s intentions and debate whether to release their prisoner or to seal his fate by returning with him to camp. Simple declarative sentences and crystalline, cinematic vignettes accrete to give voice to the soldiers’ own shortcomings and fears about their life-and-death decision. With devastating concision, Mingarelli and his translator, Sam Taylor, carry the moral dilemma to an understated yet stunning conclusion. (July)
From the Publisher
Praise for A Meal in Winter:"The book’s deceptive directness and simplicity, and its muted undercurrents of horror, will make many think of the stories of Ernest Hemingway. This is painful, unconsoling reading, but also a reminder of the power a short, perfect work of fiction can wield.”
—Wall Street Journal
“Stark and profound.”
—New York Times
“Fine reading, not just for those interested in the war.”
—Library Journal
"The command of tone and voice sustains tension until the very last page of a novel that will long resonate in the reader’s conscience."
—Kirkus Reviews (starred)
"Masterful. . . . Mingarelli offers a new twist on the Holocaust novel. His spare prose, crisply translated by Sam Taylor, adds to the narrative’s intensity and keeps you turning the pages until its poignant conclusion."
—The Huffington Post
"It is 138 profound pages of horror and humanity."
—Book of the Year, the Irish Times
"Short, powerful, vivid, and utterly compelling."
—The Jewish Chronicle
"Brilliant, devastating, [and] compelling."
—Simon Sebag Montefiore, author of The Romanovs
“Haunting…. With devastating concision, Mingarelli and his translator, Sam Taylor, carry the moral dilemma to an understated yet stunning conclusion.”
—Publishers Weekly (starred)
"The ‘banality of evil’ finds beautiful, spare expression in this remarkable novella."
—Ian McEwan
"A luminous tale…The most moving book I have read for a long time."
—The Independent on Sunday
"A masterpiece."
—The Independent
"This strong and simple story packs a mighty punch."
—The Times (London)
"Beautiful and disturbing, complex and surprising…This is not easy for the reader to handle, but Mingarelli knows what he is doing."
—The Herald (Glasgow)
Library Journal
06/15/2016Grenoble-based Mingarelli, winner of France's Prix de Médicis, shows us World War II through one spare, fierce, quietly affecting moment. Deep in the Polish winter, three German soldiers are sent from their barracks on a standard mission—go into the surrounding countryside and round up a Jew for execution. They're not altogether happy with their task—one of the soldiers, named Emmerich, is more worried about his son at home—but they haven't reached a point of aroused conscience either. After locating a victim and dragging him from his underground hideout, they wind up in a dark, freezing hut, trying to build a fire and cook a meal. A Pole knocks to be let in, and the entire group shares a tense and sullen meal. It does prompt Emmerich to cry out, "'How many have we killed?'…it's making us sick." Yet will that change their actions—or their fate? VERDICT Fine reading, not just for those interested in the war.
Kirkus Reviews
★ 2016-04-13A simple Holocaust story presents a complex moral equation. The first work by this French author to be translated into English, this short novel from 2012 packs a punch. The narrator is apparently a German soldier stationed in Poland during a very cold winter of World War II. His camp's main mission seems to be the extermination of Jews by capturing and shooting them. The narrator and his two comrades have no stomach for the killing, but their only recourse is to go searching for Jews in the countryside and bring them back instead. "We would rather do the hunting than the shootings," he tells his base commander, a reservist like him, in the plainspoken, matter-of-fact diction that characterizes the narrative and adds to its chilling conclusion. "We told him we didn't like the shootings: that doing it made us feel bad at the time and gave us bad dreams at night." So the narrator and his two very different compatriots embark on a long, frigid search, and they in fact encounter a "Jew," the first time this word is used, a third of the way into the novel. Despite a language barrier, they communicate that they are bringing him back to camp. Much of the second half of the novel finds the three soldiers and their captive in a deserted hovel where they find temporary refuge from the cold: "The house appeared from behind a row of trees. We didn't need to talk about it. The decision was made by our stomachs and the icy sky." They then face a number of other survival decisions: how to cook, eat, and stay warm. The intrusion of a Polish hunter from the countryside further complicates their situation. Though another language barrier presents itself, it is obvious that the Pole's hatred of the Jew is more intense than anything the soldiers feel. As they spend time and share food together, the captors experience some subtle shifts. Over the course of "the strangest meal we ever had in Poland," the narrator and his cohort wrestle with the morality of delivering their captive to camp. The command of tone and voice sustains tension until the very last page of a novel that will long resonate in the reader's conscience.