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Dan Vyleta is the son of Czech refugees who emigrated to Germany in the late 1960s. He holds a Ph.D. in history from the University of Cambridge. His previous novels, Pavel & I and The Quiet Twin, were published to international acclaim. Vyleta lives in Canada and the United States.
www.danvyleta.com
Dan Vyleta is the son of Czech refugees who emigrated to Germany in the late 1960s. He holds a PhD in History from the University of Cambridge. His first novel, Pavel & I, gathered immediate international acclaim and was translated into eight languages. His second novel, The Quiet Twin, was shortlisted for the Rogers Writers' Trust Fiction Prize. The Crooked Maid was a finalist for the Scotiabank Giller Prize and won the 2014 J.I. Segal Award.
www.danvyleta.com
The Crooked Maid: A Novel
by Dan Vyleta
eBook
$13.99
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ISBN-13:
9781608199471
- Publisher: Bloomsbury USA
- Publication date: 08/06/2013
- Sold by: Barnes & Noble
- Format: eBook
- Pages: 448
- File size: 18 MB
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Vienna, 1948. The war is over, and as the initial phase of denazification winds down, the citizens of Vienna struggle to rebuild their lives amidst the rubble.
Anna Beer returns to the city she fled nine years earlier upon discovering her husband's infidelity. She has come back to find him and, perhaps, to forgive him. Traveling on the same train from Switzerland is eighteen-year-old Robert Seidel, a schoolboy summoned home to his stepfather's sickbed and the secrets of his family's past.
As Anna and Robert navigate a damaged, unrecognizable city, they cross paths with a war-widowed American journalist, a hunchbacked young girl, and a former POW whose primary purpose is to survive, by any means. Meanwhile, in the shells of burned-out houses and beneath the bombed-out ruins, a ghost of a man, his head wrapped in a red scarf, battles demons from his past and hides from a future deeply uncertain for all.
In The Crooked Maid, Dan Vyleta returns to the shadows of a war-darkened Vienna, in a thrilling and atmospheric story of blame, guilt, and restitution.
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Publishers Weekly
Set in Vienna in 1948 when the scars of WWII were fresh, Vyleta’s well-crafted but overly elliptical new novel (after The Quiet Twin) begins with a chance encounter. Robert Seidel, “exiled” at his Swiss boarding school during the war and on his way home, meets Anna Beer, an older woman returning to Vienna to look for her estranged husband, a psychiatrist and former POW in a Russian camp. Seidel’s household is darkly comic and highly dysfunctional: his mother insane, his father in a coma, his brother in jail for trying to murder the father, the family tenuously held together by the brusque street smarts of Eva Frey, the maid of the title (she has a deformity of the spine). The plot plods along, powered by the vaguest whisperings of suspense (Where is Beer’s husband? What happened during the War? Is Robert’s brother guilty?), but Vyleta’s goal seems to be to couple a Graham Greene–like atmosphere of suspicion and fear with a European intellectual novelistic endeavor (the story is a parable of guilt and reconciliation). Farcical, Kafkaesque, and teeming with odd leitmotifs (crows play a symbolic role), this novel could benefit from stronger storytelling and less symbolism, but should appeal to fans of writers like Heinrich Böll. Agent: Simon Lipskar, Writers House. (Aug.)From the Publisher
Gracefully executed . . . Dramatic.” —The New York Times Book Review“A true storyteller who is also a prose stylist.” —The National Post
“Farcical, Kafkaesque . . . should appeal to fans of . . . Heinrich Böll.” —Publishers Weekly
“A psychological novel . . . [It] conjures up the stifling atmosphere of shame and deception of the postwar period and hints at escape through Vienna's own 'talking cure'—openness and honesty.” —Booklist
“Conveys the sparse, foreboding mood of Poe or Dostoevsky . . . Vyleta masterfully weaves his characters together in the light and shadow of war-torn Vienna.” —Shelf Awareness (starred review)
Kirkus Reviews
A dour excursion into a pocket of postwar Vienna, shaped by parricide, lost loves and remnants of Nazi malevolence. This sequel to Vyleta's 2012 novel, The Quiet Twin, moves the action from pre–World War II Vienna to 1948, as two people return to the city: Robert, a young man trying to uncover why his stepfather was thrown to his death from a window of the family home, and Anna, who wants to locate her long-missing husband, the doctor at the center of the previous novel. Robert's old home is occupied by a nightmarish cast of characters: His mother is lost in drugs and alcohol and unwilling to part with her portrait of Hitler; his stepbrother, Wolfgang, stands accused of murdering his father; and Wolfgang's wife is a study in ignorant lassitude. The home is being cared for--or barely so--by Eva, the hunchbacked maid of the title, who bitterly mocks Robert's efforts to understand what's happened. Life at Anna's old home is only marginally better, as her efforts to locate her husband bring her into the orbit of a U.S. expat journalist and an earnest ne'er-do-well, as well as Robert, with whom a semblance of romance blossoms. As in The Quiet Twin, Vyleta piles on intersecting characters but not always to useful effect; if Eva is meant as a symbol of the degradations of a decade under the Nazis' iron hand, she's too unlikable and too absent from much of the narrative to do the job well. Wolfgang's trial gives the novel a lift, encapsulating the mood of bloodlust and suspicion that seems to consume the city. But the multiple plot vectors dampen the story; by the time the fate of Anna's husband finally becomes clear, it registers little emotional effect. Vyleta conjures an appropriate landscape of gloom and ruin and sends too many people off to wander in it.