The Woman on the Stairs

by Bernhard Schlink, Joyce Hackett (Translator), Bradley Schmidt (Translator)

Overview

In a museum far from home, a lawyer stumbles across a painting of a woman he once knew, Irene. Decades before, he had become entangled in her affairs when he was called on to settle a dispute between her husband, who had commissioned the portrait, and the painter of the work—who was also her lover. When, ultimately, the lawyer fell in love with her himself and risked everything for her, she mysteriously disappeared—along with the painting.
 
Now, face to face with the portrait once again, the lawyer must reconcile his past and present selves. When he eventually locates Irene, he is forced to confront the truth of his love—and the reality that his life has been irrevocably changed.  A poignant, intricately crafted novel of obsession, creativity, and love, this is Bernhard Schlink at his peak.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781101912348
Publisher:	Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Publication date:	02/20/2018
Series:	Vintage International Series
Pages:	240
Product dimensions:	5.30(w) x 8.00(h) x 0.60(d)

About the Author

Bernhard Schlink is the author of the internationally bestselling novel The Reader. He is a former judge and teaches public law and legal philosophy at Humboldt University of Berlin and at the Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law in New York City.

Read an Excerpt

1
 
Perhaps you will see the painting one day. Long lost, suddenly resurfaced—all the museums will want to display it. By now, Karl Schwind is one of the most famous and expensive painters in the world. When he turned seventy, I saw him in every paper, on every channel. Still, I had to look a long time before I recognized the young man in the old.
 
The painting, I recognized immediately. I walked into the last court of the Art Gallery and there it hung. It moved me as it had when I entered the parlour of Gundlach’s villa, and saw it for the first time.
 
A woman descends a staircase. The right foot lands on the lower tread, the left grazes the upper, but is on the verge of its next step. The woman is naked, her body pale; her hair is blonde, above and below; the crown of her head gleams with light. Nude, pale and blonde—against a gray-green backdrop of blurred stairs and walls, the woman moves lightly, as if floating, towards the viewer. And yet her long legs, ample hips, and full breasts give her a sensual weight.
 
I approached the painting slowly. I felt awkward, just as I had back then. Then, it was because the woman who, a day before, had sat in my office in jeans, blouse, and jacket approached me in the painting naked. Now I felt awkward because the painting brought up what happened back then, what I’d gotten myself into, and what I had soon banished from memory.
 
Woman on Staircase, the label read. The painting was on loan. I found the curator and asked him who had lent the painting. He said he couldn’t disclose the name. I told him I knew the woman in the painting, and the owner of the painting, and that its ownership would likely be contested. He furrowed his brow, but again said he couldn’t tell me the name.

Reading Group Guide

This guide is designed to enhance your reading group’s focus on some of the main concepts in The Woman on the Stairs and to enable readers to explore and share different perspectives. Feel free to wander in your discussion, and use this as a guideline only!

1. Why do you think the author never gives the narrator a name?

2. How do you feel about Irene? Do you like her?

3. How are Schmidt and Gundlach foils of each other? Why does Gundlach keep damaging the painting?

4. What do you think of the contract between Schmidt and Gundlach? How would you feel if you were in Irene’s position?

5. Were you surprised that Irene disappeared without a word to the narrator?

6. Who do you think really owned the painting?

7. Irene says with contempt: “For Gundlach I was the young, blonde, beautiful trophy, only the packaging counted. For Schwind, I was a muse, the packaging was enough for that too. Then you came along. A woman’s third stupid role, after the trophy and the muse, is the damsel in distress who must be rescued by the prince. To stop her falling into the hands of the villain, the prince takes her into his own hands. After all, she belongs in the hands of some man” (p. 86). What do you think about her summation of a woman’s roles?

8. Do you think the narrator is still naïve when he goes to the island? What does he expect to happen versus what actually does?

9. How is the older Irene’s life on Red Cove different than her younger self (in part one)?

10. The narrator gives the argument that “The value of life remains a mystery to me. How can one define the value of something lost, if the person who has lost it doesn’t miss it?” (97). What do you think of that sentiment?

11. “Or is it the small defeats that we can’t get over? . . . The big early defeats change the course of our lives. The small ones don’t change us, but they stay with us and torment us, little thorns in our side” (p. 133-134). Do you agree with the narrator?

12. When the four main players meet again at the house in the cove, who has changed the most? The least?

13. What do you think of the character of Kari? What does the author use him to demonstrate?

14. Irene became a nurse and took in stray children after she left Schmidt. Does this make her a more sympathetic character in your eyes?

15. Why do you think the author never explains what Irene’s crime was? What was the purpose of including that as part of the plot?

16. Do you think the narrator and Irene loved each other at the end of the book? Why or why not?

Editorial Reviews

Spellbinding. . . . Runs on taut suspense.” —O, The Oprah Magazine 

“Has the grip of a mystery. . . . A satisfying ending . . . keeps the novel alive after the last page has been turned.” —The Washington Times

“At the heart of this terse novel is a love rectangle, decades in the past. . . . A chance glimpse of the picture in a gallery on the other side of the world leads to a series of reunions and examinations of male possessiveness.” —The New Yorker

“Elegant. . . . Exquisitely wrought. . . . Profound and moving.” —Buffalo News

“A page-turner. . . . Shine[s] a light on Schlink’s brilliance as a contemplative writer who, through simple prose and complex characters, mediates on life and all its challenges.” —New York Journal of Books

“Schlink, a professor of law in both Germany and the United States, writes with lawyerly precision, and his protagonist’s midlife search for meaning is thought-provoking and surprisingly tender.” —BookPage

“Flawlessly simple prose. Bernhard Schlink is a master. . . . His writing is understandable, transparent and intelligent. Seemingly effortless, he manages to create a variety of complex characters, tangled plots and moral dilemmas.” —Die Welt

“A gripping novel about what happens when life’s plans fall apart.” —Hannoversche Allgemeine Zeitung

“A daring, hugely emotional work of literature.” —News (Austria)

“[Schlink] has succeeded in writing a veritable thriller, which subtly and expertly intertwines perceptions of art and contemporary political events.” —Weser-Kurier

“Gripping and intelligent, offset with a good portion of thoughtfulness.” —Rhein-Main-Press

“Exquisite. . . . A profoundly moving meditation on how one’s life is affected by the choices one makes along the way.” —Publishers Weekly (starred review)

“A mysterious, character-driven, and history-enriched story. . . . Schlink’s prose captivates.” —Booklist

“[A] poignant meditation on recrimination and regret.” —Library Journal

From the Publisher

Reading Bernhard Schlink's work in German and then English translation, as I've done with The Woman on the Stairs, can be disorienting. The original obviously affords a more direct encounter with Schlink's style and literary sensibility. His German is structurally simple yet elegant and poetic — rhythmic and filled with assonance, alliteration, and half- rhymes. Immersing oneself in his language can be a sensuous experience.

But along with the pleasures come frustrations. For the non- native reader, the experience is akin to peering through a scrim veiling the author's meaning — not unlike the efforts of Schlink's protagonists to discern truth through the murk of misunderstanding. In fact, one signature of Schlink's fiction is the sudden perspectival shift. His plots — sometimes explicit detective stories, sometimes not — often contain elements of mystery. With each discovery, a Schlink protagonist reconsiders his view of his life, his relationships, and ultimately his own identity. Even the genre novels, like his Self trilogy, have an existential dimension.

Schlink himself is a former judge who is now a law professor, and the probing, analytical turn of mind that suits a jurist also informs his fiction. His best-known book is The Reader, an allegory of love and guilt that explores the complicated bonds between the postwar generation of Germans and their elders. The weight of German history — the problem the Germans call Vergangenheitsbewältigung, or coming to terms with the past — is a powerful presence in Schlink's work. Sometimes, as in The Reader, the historical references are both explicit and central.

Hitler, the tumultuous radicalism of the 1960s, the division and reunification of Germany — all are mentioned in The Woman on the Stairs. But they serve mostly as a backdrop to an obsession with a more personal past. The subhead of an admiring online review by Deutsche Welle, Germany's international public television station, dubbed the novel's concerns "Vergangenheitsbewältigung light;" the review itself described them as "all too human."

Schlink's unnamed protagonist, who doubles as the narrator, is a successful mergers-and-acquisitions lawyer who had once sought to be a judge. Stereotypically unimaginative and self- congratulatory, he disdains novels, tears, and the demands of children (including his own).

On the cusp of old age, he finds himself drawn back into the orbit of an elusive woman he had once loved and for whom he had (uncharacteristically) risked his career. Her unexplained betrayal has shadowed his otherwise conventional life, which included a marriage cut short by his politician wife's fatal car accident.

As a fledgling lawyer, the narrator met Irene, the titular woman on the stairs, because of a legal conflict over a painting for which she had modeled. The relationship between portrait and subject — art and life, fiction and history — is another familiar Schlink theme, linked here to the interplay between past and present that shapes the book's narrative structure.

Art has the capacity not just to idealize but, as Schlink's characters note, to freeze time. The fictional painting — titled Woman on Staircase — directly evokes two actual ones. Irene describes the representational work as a response to Marcel Duchamp's Nude Descending a Staircase, No. 2, the unsettling Cubist- and Futurist-influenced sensation of New York's 1913 Armory Show. And in an "Author's Note," Schlink acknowledges the inspiration of Gerhard Richter's Ema (Nude on a Staircase), a deliberately blurry 1966 portrait of the artist's first wife, based on a photograph.

The novel begins when the narrator suddenly re-encounters the portrait in a Sydney, Australia, art gallery that is part of the city's Botanic Garden — a place, he tells us, where "time stands still." Peter Gundlach, the multimillionaire businessman once married to Irene, will later underline the point, declaring that "[p]aintings halt the march of time."

Flashback scenes offer glimpses of the narrator's youth, characterized by material comfort and emotional deprivation, and his initial interactions, in Frankfurt, with Irene and the portrait. The occasion of their meeting is a dispute between Karl Schwind, the painting's creator, and Gundlach, its owner. Irene has left Gundlach for Schwind, and the two men are wrangling over both the painting and the woman, a contest in which Irene is both queen and pawn. The work in question seems to the narrator to embody a "jumble of power and seduction, resistance and surrender." Falling hard for Irene (or perhaps just his image of her), he helps her escape the two men and abscond with the portrait. But while he fantasizes a life with her, she disappears without a trace.

The portrait, however, surfaces in Sydney, and a private eye finds Irene living, without proper papers, on a nearly deserted Australian island. Temporarily abandoning his responsibilities, the narrator sails off to meet her. Soon enough, rather improbably, Schwind and Gundlach also show up. (Literal realism has never been Schlink's forte — nor, for that matter, his aim.) The two men argue the respective merits of art and commerce and then depart, leaving the narrator alone with the dying Irene.

The narrative unfolds in a series of short chapters, segueing between past and present in English prose that seems both staccato and unadorned. As the lawyer grows closer to Irene, he struggles with intimacy, closure, impending loss, and the homely rigors of caregiving. He slowly relinquishes his obsession with judgment by questioning his own. At Irene's request, he becomes a modern-day Scheherazade, recounting their imagined life together as a way of staving off death. He invents a healing "fiction, but fiction in which we appeared as we really were." It draws on his actual experiences and her suggestions and becomes, like the best novels, more vivid and true than reality.

No doubt some readers and critics will find The Woman on the Stairs unduly sentimental. In the end, the narrator realizes that Irene was not just his fantasy but "a woman with a life of her own." He thinks: "How courageously she had lived it; how timidly I had lived mine." The lessons are indeed obvious - - precisely the ones he needed to learn. But the narrator's emotional transformation is also poignant, earned, and utterly convincing. The scrim lifts, and, in the language of the heart he now knows, his way forward becomes clear.

Julia M. Klein, the Forward's contributing book critic, was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle's Nona Balakian Citation for Excellence in Reviewing.Follow her on Twitter @JuliaMKlein.

Reviewer: Julia M. Klein

The Barnes & Noble Review

★ 01/16/2017
At the start of this exquisite novel from Schlink (The Reader), the narrator, an unnamed German lawyer, stumbles on a painting he recognizes, Woman on Staircase, in a Sydney, Australia, art gallery. The narrator recounts how he fell in love with the painting’s nude subject, Irene Gundlach, when he met her in his office with the artist, Karl Schwind, years before. Karl wanted to sue the owner, Irene’s husband, Peter, to permit Karl to photograph the painting for his portfolio. After finally obtaining access to the painting, Karl discovered a small tear and sought the lawyer’s further help procuring Peter’s permission to repair the damage. The ensuing case found the lawyer entering into shady dealings with Karl, Peter, and Irene. In the present, the lawyer hires a detective to find Irene. The search for Irene and the unearthing of her true story brings the narrator to a new awareness of who he is and how he wants to live his remaining years. Schlink offers a profoundly moving meditation on how one’s life is affected by the choices one makes along the way. (Mar.)

Publishers Weekly

02/01/2017
Karl Schwind was an unknown German artist when he painted Woman on Staircase, running off with the model, Irene Gundlach, and leaving the artwork to her husband, who had commissioned it. Not satisfied with winning the woman, Karl wants his painting returned. He and Irene hire our narrator, a naïve lawyer in thrall to Irene's beauty, to begin litigation against Gundlach. In the hapless attorney Irene sees an opportunity to outwit all three of these men, who want to claim her body and soul. Decades later, while in Sydney for business, the lawyer spots the long-missing painting on display in a museum. Although Irene used and humiliated him, he has never stopped imagining what might have been. Could she be here in Australia? In a fever of hope, he puts his legal skills to work, determined to find Irene and coerce an explanation for her disappearance from his life. VERDICT This poignant meditation on recrimination and regret explores the nature of unrequited love and the gift of redemption. Too often though, it's bogged down by stilted, inauthentic conversations that emphasize the self-absorption of all four main characters. Those familiar with Schlink's earlier book The Reader will find that this new novel lacks a similar heft. [See Prepub Alert, 10/3/16.]—Sally Bissell, formerly with Lee Cty. Lib. Syst., Fort Myers, FL

Library Journal

2016-12-18
At two points in time, three men find themselves involved with the same woman in this latest by the bestselling author of The Reader (1997).While in Sydney for work, a lawyer, who narrates the story, sees a painting in a gallery that stirs up 40-year-old memories of one of his first cases back in Frankfurt. It involved a tug of war between an industrialist who commissioned a life-size nude of his wife and the artist who did the work and then ran off with the model. A conflict involving damage to and restoration of the canvas escalates to where the lawyer is asked to draw up a contract under which the artist regains ownership of the painting but returns the wife. Meanwhile, the lawyer, whose ethics prove increasingly elastic, has fallen in love with the woman and agrees to help her steal the painting and flee from both her beaux. He also assumes he will become her new paramour. Foolish man. She absconds altogether with her nude canvas self. Back in present-day Sydney, the lawyer surmises the woman is living nearby and hires a detective to find her, hoping to satisfy a surge of nostalgia and answer some old questions. In no time at all, Schlink (Summer Lies, 2012, etc.) has lawyer, industrialist, and artist all gathered in a remote area of Australia, where the woman has been living a kind of hippie life for many years. The painter and tycoon remain acquisitive and two-dimensional, while the woman's post-flight life is dabbed with suggestions of color. The lawyer is revealed as a lifelong cold fish warming up to his one old flame. But who wins the hand of a once-fair maiden known for her fine birthday suit? Alas, that would be revealing one of the book's few surprises. Despite some touching scenes near the end, Schlink doesn't seem to have the creative wherewithal to bring his characters and themes fully to life.

Kirkus Reviews