The Wall

by H. G. Adler, Peter Filkins (Translator)

Overview

NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY PUBLISHERS WEEKLY

Compared by critics to Kafka, Joyce, and Musil, H. G. Adler is becoming recognized as one of the towering figures of twentieth-century fiction. Nobel Prize winner Elias Canetti wrote that “Adler has restored hope to modern literature,” and the first two novels rediscovered after his death, Panorama and The Journey, were acclaimed as “modernist masterpieces” by The New Yorker. Now his magnum opus, The Wall, the final installment of Adler’s Shoah trilogy and his crowning achievement as a novelist, is available for the first time in English.
 
Drawing upon Adler’s own experiences in the Holocaust and his postwar life, The Wall, like the other works in the trilogy, nonetheless avoids detailed historical specifics. The novel tells the story of Arthur Landau, survivor of a wartime atrocity, a man struggling with his nightmares and his memories of the past as he strives to forge a new life for himself. Haunted by the death of his wife, Franziska, he returns to the city of his youth and receives confirmation of his parents’ fates, then crosses the border and leaves his homeland for good.
 
Embarking on a life of exile, he continues searching for his place within the world. He attempts to publish his study of the victims of the war, yet he is treated with curiosity, competitiveness, and contempt by fellow intellectuals who escaped the conflict unscathed. Afflicted with survivor’s guilt, Arthur tries to leave behind the horrors of the past and find a foothold in the present. Ultimately, it is the love of his second wife, Johanna, and his two children that allows him to reaffirm his humanity while remembering all he’s left behind.
 
The Wall is a magnificent epic of survival and redemption, powerfully told through stream of consciousness and suffused with daydream, fantasy, memory, nightmare, and pure imagination. More than a portrait of a Holocaust survivor’s journey, it is a universal novel about recovering from the traumas of the past and finding a way to live again.

Praise for The Wall
 
“[A] majestic novel . . . Adler’s prose is tidal, surge after narrative surge rushing forward and then enigmatically receding, the moment displaced by memory, and memory by introspective soliloquy.”—Cynthia Ozick, The New York Times Book Review

“A towering meditation on the self and spirit . . . The writing is sonorous and so entirely devastating that the reader is compelled to pore over every word.”—Publishers Weekly (starred review)
 
“Masterful and utterly unique.”—The Jerusalem Post
 
“Haunting and utterly heart-wrenching . . . a literary masterpiece.”—Historical Novels Review
 
“An epic novel . . . an unforgettable portrait.”—The Jewish Week

“[A] pensive portrait of a man struggling to find a place in the world after enduring transformative calamity . . . an eloquent record of suffering—and perhaps of redemption as well.”—Kirkus Reviews
 
Praise for H. G. Adler’s novels The Journey and Panorama, translated by Peter Filkins
 
“Modernist masterpieces worthy of comparison to those of Kafka or Musil.”—The New Yorker
 
“Haunting . . . as remarkable for its literary experimentation as for its historical testimony.”—San Francisco Chronicle, on Panorama

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780812993066
Publisher:	Random House Inc
Publication date:	12/02/2014
Product dimensions:	6.50(w) x 1.50(h) x 9.50(d)

About the Author

H. G. Adler was the author of twenty-six books of fiction, poetry, philosophy, and history. A survivor of Theresienstadt and Auschwitz, Adler later settled in England and began writing novels about his experience. Having worked as a freelance writer and scholar throughout his life, Adler died in London in 1988.
 
Peter Filkins is an acclaimed translator and poet and the recipient of a Berlin Prize fellowship in 2005 from the American Academy in Berlin, among other honors. He teaches writing and literature at Bard College at Simon’s Rock in Great Barrington, Massachusetts, and translation at Bard College in Annandale-on-Hudson, New York.

Editorial Reviews

…fantasy alternates with panic, and panic with sardonic realism…Adler's prose is tidal, surge after narrative surge rushing forward and then enigmatically receding, the moment displaced by memory, and memory by introspective soliloquy…Adler has the courage of his idiosyncratic art, and though The Wall has been acclaimed a modernist masterwork, it is perversely premodern in its lavish freedom to go whither it wills, and to ponder, and to linger, and to suffer felt experience to the lees.

The New York Times Book Review - Cynthia Ozick

★ 10/27/2014
This is Adler’s third (posthumous) and final work in the Shoah trilogy (after The Journey and Panorama), one of the very few works of Holocaust fiction written by a survivor. The author, once a prisoner at Theresienstadt and three other concentration camps, crafted this modernist homage to his despair over the course of many years; it was first published in 1989. His protagonist, Arthur—most certainly Adler himself—is an exile in the “Metropolis,” a thinly disguised London. He lives a bemused existence with his second wife, Joanna, and their two children, going through the motions of being a father, and indeed of being human. He has suffered something so dreadful that it is almost impossible to articulate, but it seems that his first wife perished in the war, as did his parents. In his dreams, which reflect in an absurdist way the real horror he faced, he returns to his father’s haberdashery in Prague; sometimes his parents are still alive and sometimes they die before his very eyes. Neighbors recognize and pity Arthur, knowing more than he about the fate of his family. He reminisces or dreams about being taken in by friends he does not recollect, of interacting with scholarly colleagues in London, and of meeting his beloved Joanna, on whom he relies utterly as his only link to the world in which he now finds himself adrift. He also imagines witnessing his own death. The symbolic wall of the title is purported to be the past, but it is much more: an existential barrier made of pain that separates him from the rest of humanity. The past and the present are indistinguishable in the stream of Adler’s consciousness, but this distracts very little from the story. The writing is sonorous and so entirely devastating that the reader is compelled to pore over every word. One cannot begin to share this author’s anguish, but can participate in not allowing it to be forgotten. (Dec.)

Publishers Weekly

Praise for The Wall
 
“[A] majestic novel . . . Adler’s prose is tidal, surge after narrative surge rushing forward and then enigmatically receding, the moment displaced by memory, and memory by introspective soliloquy.”—Cynthia Ozick, The New York Times Book Review

“A towering meditation on the self and spirit . . . The writing is sonorous and so entirely devastating that the reader is compelled to pore over every word.”—Publishers Weekly (starred review)
 
“Masterful and utterly unique.”—The Jerusalem Post
 
“Haunting and utterly heart-wrenching . . . a literary masterpiece.”—Historical Novels Review
 
“An epic novel . . . an unforgettable portrait.”—The Jewish Week

“[A] pensive portrait of a man struggling to find a place in the world after enduring transformative calamity . . . an eloquent record of suffering—and perhaps of redemption as well.”—Kirkus Reviews

Praise for H. G. Adler’s novels The Journey and Panorama, translated by Peter Filkins
 
“The Journey and Panorama . . . are modernist masterpieces worthy of comparison to those of Kafka or Musil.”—The New Yorker
 
The Journey
 
“The novel’s streaming consciousness and verbal play invite comparison with Joyce, the individual-dwarfing scale of law and prohibition brings Kafka to mind, and there is something in the hypnotic pulse of the prose that is reminiscent of Gertrude Stein.”—The New York Times Book Review
 
“A tribute to the survival of art and a poignant teaching in the art of survival . . . I tend to shy away from Holocaust fiction, but this book helps redeem an all-but-impossible genre.”—Harold Bloom
 
Panorama
 
“Haunting . . . as remarkable for its literary experimentation as for its historical testimony.”—San Francisco Chronicle
 
“Panorama should have been the brilliant debut of a major German writer. . . . Under any circumstances, let alone such harsh ones, [Adler’s] accomplishments would be remarkable.”—The New York Times Book Review
 
“[A] stirring novel . . . expertly and elegantly translated by Peter Filkins.”—Los Angeles Times

From the Publisher

2014-10-23
Pensive portrait of a man struggling to find a place in the world after enduring transformative calamity. "To write poetry after Auschwitz," wrote the German literary critic Theodore Adorno, "is barbaric." But what of those who lived through Auschwitz? Just to live, to say nothing of writing, is problematic. So thinks the protagonist of survivor Adler's novel, the last in a trilogy, the preceding two volumes of which were published out of order a half-century ago. There is the sheer guilt of being alive when so many died, and then there are the memories, the past that "hisses in my ears, causes horrible and sometimes also multiple sensations, pressing into me, lifting me, holding ready a thousand horrors…." Arthur Landau has lived. At the beginning of the 1960s, he's living in London, beginning to trust his neighbors a little, even though he and his family are the definitive strangers: "[T]he few people who know something about us are no less than an hour away." The welcome trade-off, Landau says, is that no one bothers him, though the thought is always with him that he could just as easily disappear from the street with no one noticing or caring, as before. Landau's world is one of memories that sometimes become very real—if only in his mind, though it's not always easy for him or for readers to distinguish the real from the imagined, as with his Dostoyevski-an encounter with an "Assessor of Sympathies." Landau's disconnection is more affecting, and more open to the reader's sympathy, than that of the protagonist of Elias Canetti's Auto-da-Fé, which has a similarly strident quality; Adler's novel has a Kafkaesque dimension as well, save that Landau has at least the saving grace of an understanding wife who does what she can to make him feel safe, or at least safer, in the world: "She was happy to see," Landau tells us, "that I had achieved a partial and tolerable sense of resignation." An eloquent record of suffering—and perhaps of redemption as well.

Kirkus Reviews