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WITH A FOREWORD BY EDMUND DE WAAL, AUTHOR OF THE HARE WITH AMBER EYES
SET IN THE ASHES OF POST–SECOND WORLD WAR VIENNA, A POWERFUL, SUBTLE NOVEL OF EXILES RETURNING HOME FIFTEEN YEARS AFTER FLEEING HITLER'S DEADLY REIGN
Vienna is demolished by war, the city an alien landscape of ruined castles, a fractured ruling class, and people picking up the pieces. Elisabeth de Waal's mesmerizing The Exiles Return is a stunningly vivid postwar story of Austria's fallen aristocrats, unrepentant Nazis, and a culture degraded by violence.
The novel follows a number of exiles, each returning under very different circumstances, who must come to terms with a city in painful recovery. There is Kuno Adler, a Jewish research scientist, who is tired of his unfulfilling existence in America; Theophil Kanakis, a wealthy Greek businessman, seeking to plunder some of the spoils of war; Marie-Theres, a brooding teenager, sent by her parents in hopes that the change of scene will shake her out of her funk; and Prince "Bimbo" Grein, a handsome young man with a title divested of all its social currency.
With immaculate precision and sensitivity, de Waal, an exile herself, captures a city rebuilding and relearning its identity, and the people who have to do the same. Mesmerizing and tragic, de Waal has written a masterpiece of European literature, an artifact revealing a moment in our history, clear as a snapshot, but timeless as well.
- Sales Rank: #349735 in Books
- Published on: 2015-01-13
- Released on: 2015-01-13
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: 8.17" h x .97" w x 5.49" l, 1.00 pounds
- Binding: Paperback
- 336 pages
From Booklist
Readers of Edmund de Waal’s gripping Jewish family history, The Hare with Amber Eyes (2010), will remember his brilliant, courageous grandmother, born Elisabeth von Ephrussi (1899–1991). A lawyer steeped in economics and philosophy, Elisabeth wrote poetry and, during the late 1950s, five novels, including this never-before-published, incisive, and tragic tale of bombarded and morally decimated postwar Vienna. In his foreword, Edmund explains that the novel is “profoundly autobiographical,” though Elisabeth cleverly covers her tracks. As the story begins, the paralyzed city is reluctantly repatriating Jewish exiles who fled the Nazis. Professor Kuno Adler returns to his old laboratory, where he confronts a “self-confessed, unrepentant Nazi.” Sent to stay with her aunt in the bucolic Austrian countryside, beautiful and diffident Marie-Theres, the American daughter of an exiled princess, is inextricably drawn into the decadent intrigues of Vienna’s elite. De Waal’s acid, eyewitness drama of malignant prejudice, innocence betrayed, the disintegration of the old order, and love transcendent has the same jolting immediacy as the novels of Iréne Némorisky as well as deeply archetypal dimensions. Another de Waal triumph of illumination. --Donna Seaman
Review
“[The Exiles Return] has an immediacy that makes de Waal's readers feel the experiences of its characters in a visceral way.” ―The New York Times Book Review
“With the publication, after all these years, of The Exiles Return, we are allowed to hear a voice that has not only endured but, by the subtlety and fervor of its free expression, triumphed.” ―Andrew Ervin, The New York Times Book Review
“A masterpiece of European literature.” ―The Buffalo News
“[The Exiles Return] succeeds magnificiently on its own uncompromising terms . . . And in holding up a uniquely wrought mirror to [de Waal's] Vienna.” ―San Francisco Chronicle
“Elisabeth de Waal has assembled an unusual tableau--evocative and altogether memorable . . . Here's hoping that The Exiles Return will now find the American audience that it deserves.” ―Erika Dreifus, The Washington Post
“There is a distinctly fin de siècle feel to Elisabeth de Waal's rediscovered novel about Viennese exiles, banished by war, streaming back to their native city in the mid-1950s. The Exiles Return captures the atmosphere of post-World War II Vienna, with its crumbling buildings, decaying aristocracy, mercantile fervor and ideological denial. But its restrained prose style and preoccupation with the gap between public morality and private behavior evoke even more strongly the novels of Henry James, Thomas Hardy, Gustave Flaubert, Leo Tolstoy and other 19th-century masters . . . The Exiles Return is both an oddity and the bittersweet legacy of a gifted writer, melding the narrative pleasures of fiction with a vivid historical snapshot.” ―Chicago Tribune
“The Exiles Return is, in a sense, a reverie about what it meant to return to postwar Vienna; a dream turned nightmare of a family wanting to recoup its wartime losses . . . The Exiles Return, a novel of five exiles returning home after fleeing Hitler, is a masterpiece of European literature.” ―The Buffalo News
“[An] incisive, and tragic tale of bombarded and morally decimated postwar Vienna . . . De Waal's acid, eyewitness drama of malignant prejudice, innocence betrayed, the disintegration of the old order, and love transcendent has the same jolting immediacy as the novels of Irene Nemirovsky as well as deeply archetypal dimensions.” ―Booklist
“Like Irène Némirovsky and Hans Keilson, de Waal bore witness to the tragedy of World War II; as her grandson recounts in his best-selling The Hare with Amber Eyes, their Jewish banking family's possessions were appropriated by the Germans when they marched in Austria . . . Expect poignancy and an indelible sense of the time.” ―Barbara Hoffert, Library Journal (Barbara's Picks)
“An elegant, unpublished novel . . . This novel reveals [de Waal's] intelligence and articulateness as it evokes 1950s Vienna, haunted by the ghosts of its distant and more recent pasts . . . Restrained yet incisive, this finely observed novel lacks a resounding conclusion but nevertheless offers European mood music of a particular and beguiling resonance.” ―Kirkus Reviews
“This is a rewarding study of loss, and a fine snapshot of a city and society standing ravaged at a crossroads.” ―The Guardian (London)
“[Elisabeth de Waal] captures the fragility of a city trying to rebuild itself on uncertain foundations . . . It is an important story and now, at last, it has been told.” ―The Spectator (London)
“The Exiles Return is a novel of great vividness and great tenderness, which at its heart depicts what it might mean to return from exile. Within its pages it reflects a truly ambitious writer and a woman of considerable courage.” ―from Edmund de Waal's Foreword
About the Author
Elisabeth de Waal was born in Vienna in 1899. She studied philosophy, law, and economics at the University of Vienna, and completed her doctorate in 1923. She also wrote poems (often corresponding with Rilke), and was a Rockefeller Foundation fellow at Columbia. She wrote five unpublished novels, two in German and three in English, including The Exiles Return in the late 1950s. She died in 1991.
Most helpful customer reviews
31 of 31 people found the following review helpful.
"I am one of those, Dr Krieger, whom you didn't get rid of"...
By Jill Meyer
Elisabeth de Waal was the grandmother Edmund de Waal, the acclaimed author of "The Hare With the Amber Eyes". She was born in 1899 and was raised in luxury in Vienna, the daughter of a wealthy Jewish family. She married into the Dutch de Waal family and was able to flee to safety during the war. A highly educated woman, she wrote five books - unpublished until this one, "The Exiles Return" was found among her papers and put to print after her death.
"The Exiles Return" is the story, set in 1954 in post-war Vienna, of three returnees to the city from various forms of exile. Professor Kuno Adler - a Jewish scientist - had fled the city before WW2 with his family, to the safety of America. His wife and daughters had prospered there but Adler had never felt at home in New York. He returns to Vienna with the promise of reinstatement of his job and responsibility and with the hope of personal renewal. Marie-Theres Larsen, the daughter of a Viennese aristocratic mother and a Danish father, has been sent to live with her Austrian aunts to try to settle herself. She is 18 and is a beautiful but naive young woman. And Theophil Kanakis, a wealthy Greek-Austrian, has returned to Vienna with a lot of money and hopes to build himself a life filled with beauty and wit. The plot - what there is of it - is much less important than the character studies and the city of Vienna, which is as important to the story as those who live there.
The quote in the title of the review is what Professor Adler says to his boss at the scientific institute where he works. The man, Dr Kreiger, has tried to justify his work in concentration camps where he preformed experiments on inmates, all in the name of "science". He tells Adler that he had been "cleared" and that, anyway, he never experimented on Jews, "only on gypsies". When Krieger asks Adler - finally - why he came back, Adler answers with the quote above. It is one of the most moving - and least nuanced - statements in the book.
Professor Adler falls in love in his return to Vienna from exile. The other two main characters fall into an odd alliance, which ends in tragedy. Marie-Theres - called "Resi" as a nickname - is never really defined, past "beautiful" and "troubled". She falls in and out of situations of love and is really the object around which Kanakis and his friends revolve. She never became real or interesting to me from the reader's point-of-view. She was an "object" that many men wanted to possess.
"The Exiles Return" is a book that people interested in the war-time and post-war periods of Austria should read. It's a good read but one that is a bit empty at its core. I don't know whether Elisabeth de Waal was reticent as a writer or if the times the book was written called for reticence, but I'd advise reading it more as a historic document than as a study of character.
21 of 22 people found the following review helpful.
The heartbreak of returning.
By SueKich
Edmund de Waal is the author of word-of-mouth bestseller, The Hare with Amber Eyes. In his preface to his grandmother Elisabeth de Waal's wonderfully empathetic novel, he writes:
"My grandmother had spent her life in transit between countries: she kept only the things that mattered to her. And these pages did...This untitled novel, now called The Exiles Return, was not published in her lifetime. In conversation with her about why writing matters, she never revealed what this fact meant to her, and it was only recently that I found this single and extraordinary page:
"'Why am I making such a great effort and taxing my own endurance and energy to write this book that no one will read? Why do I have to write? Because I have always written, all my life, and have always striven to do so, and have always faltered on the way and hardly ever succeeded in getting published....What is lacking? I have a feeling for language...But I think I write in a rarified atmosphere. I lack the common touch, it is all too finely distilled. I deal in essences, the taste of which is too subtle to register on the tongue. It is the quintessence of experiences, not the experiences themselves...I distill too much.'"
Mr de Waal continues: "Elisabeth de Waal was Viennese and this is a novel about being Viennese. As such, it is a novel about exile and about return, about the push and pull of love, anger and despair about a place which is part of your identity, but which has also rejected you. The Exiles Return is alive to this complexity and it stands, in part, as a kind of autobiography in its mapping of these emotions...But above all the book is about the heartbreak of returning."
Thank you to Edmund de Waal for his moving preface and to Persephone [in the UK] for publishing this book.
16 of 16 people found the following review helpful.
Its elegiac atmosphere, if not its plot, has staying power
By Bookreporter
One of the best memoirs I’ve read in recent years is THE HARE WITH AMBER EYES, Edmund de Waal’s masterly account of his forebears, the Ephrussis, a prosperous Jewish banking family that settled in Vienna in the mid-19th century. This novel, THE EXILES RETURN, is by his grandmother Elisabeth; he found the typescript among her papers in 2005. She had tried and failed to get it published and died in 1991 believing, as Edmund reports in his Foreword, that it was “a book that no one will read.”
I trust that Elisabeth is smiling in her grave. It was published in the UK in 2013, the 75th anniversary of the Anschluss (Hitler’s 1938 takeover of Austria). I want to give a shout-out to its British publishers, a marvelous small press called Persephone that, in their words, “reprints neglected fiction and non-fiction by mid-twentieth-century (mostly women) writers.” In this case they celebrated not a reprise but a debut.
Edmund de Waal calls the novel “profoundly autobiographical. Born into a privileged family, Elisabeth achieved intellectual stature in her own right, studying philosophy, law and economics at the university and writing poetry (she corresponded with Rilke, no less). After the Anschluss, though she had already left Vienna, she returned to save her parents; she went back again after the war to try to get restitution for their shattered lives and looted property. She knew intimately what it was like to confront a ravaged homeland.
The first half of THE EXILES RETURN is taken up with the stories of five expatriates who return to Vienna in 1954. They could not be more different. Professor Kuno Adler is a Jewish scientist who has been living in New York with his unpleasant and successful wife. Although upon his return he is reinstated in the lab where he formerly worked, he occupies a lowly position and is baited by the director, a chillingly unabashed former Nazi. Adler is de Waal’s finest creation, of all her characters the most subtle in his thinking and the most naked in his wistful longing to rediscover Vienna by going to its roots. Wandering about the city and the surrounding countryside, he discovers a quiet joy in solitude, very unlike the loneliness he’d felt in exile (“like an incurable disease”).
Theophil Kanakis is a wealthy Greek businessman living in America whose family, not unlike Elisabeth de Waal’s, was a force to be reckoned with in prewar Vienna. He sees the city principally as a choice spot for a nostalgic retreat that he will fill with antique objets d’art and glamorous young people. A blend of crass capitalist and decadent connoisseur, Kanakis is thoroughly unlikable but not without weakness. He has a passion for a disreputable, impoverished prince who goes by the unlikely nickname of Bimbo (the vagaries of English slang can create anomalies when publication is delayed for nearly 60 years!). Bimbo and his sister --- the virtuous Nina, who lives modestly, calling herself not Princess but Fräulein --- were orphaned after the Nazis murdered their antifascist parents, then hidden during the war. They, too, are trying to reclaim Vienna.
The last of de Waal’s protagonists is the daughter of exiles, an Austrian princess and Danish chemist who have resettled in suburban America. Eighteen-year-old Marie-Theres, known as Resi, is a bored, restless young woman, and her parents hope a visit to Austria will help. First she stays in the countryside with her Aunt Franzi, a countess, and then in Vienna proper with another of her mother’s sisters. Resi is ravishingly beautiful, but indifferent to the young men who court her --- until she meets Bimbo at one of Kanakis’s parties. In this louche, amoral world, her innocence dooms her.
De Waal’s candor about less conventional pathways of love (homosexuality, extramarital sex, and teenage pregnancy and abortion all figure in the book) was likely a radical choice for the late 1950s. Could that have been a factor in her failure to find a publisher? I remember, in the same period, the scandal of an American play, later a movie, called Blue Denim, that dealt frankly with issues of adolescent pregnancy and (then illegal) abortion.
But there may be other reasons that THE EXILES RETURN didn’t get published. I hope it is no offense to the dead to say that I think it is more successful as historical testimony than as fiction.
It is not that de Waal lacks talent as a writer. Her descriptive powers are impressive; she evokes postwar Vienna in all its melancholy beauty and lingering sense of menace and gives Resi, Adler and Nina a finely tuned emotional life (not so for the less savory characters, who remain more one-dimensional and serve mainly as bad fairies who drive the tragic action). Here is Adler, apprehensive as his train first crosses into Austria: “It felt like a physical sickness, a mental darkness….[H]e was an animal, tense, wary, charged with feeling, stripped of reason.” Here he is again a few months later, on a May night in Vienna when he sits by his window “breathing the scent of lime and lilac and feeling myself languish in an overpowering and aimless desire, the desire of the young man for love.”
But the book isn’t structured effectively; the entire first half is devoted to each of the exiles in turn, and I grew impatient at the lack of focus. Although connections among them are finally established, these plot devices arrive so late in the day that they often seem forced. And de Waal’s dialogue tends to be mannered; the scene between Adler and the head of the lab, for example, approaches melodrama. (Would this monster really confess his inhumanity to a Jewish colleague of whom he is envious and distrustful?)
And yet, this is a haunting novel that explores age-old questions of memory, identity and loss, and how they are embedded in a particular time and place. Its elegiac atmosphere, if not its plot, has staying power.
More than 400,000 U.S. citizens died in World War II. But our territory was not breached: our families slaughtered or exiled, our belongings seized, our whole way of life destroyed in an instant. Most Americans can never quite understand what it means to have that happen. THE EXILES RETURN helps us to grasp such a cataclysm by capturing the bittersweet destiny of those who assert, to paraphrase Thomas Wolfe, that they can go home again.
Reviewed by Kathy Weissman
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