![]() ![]() He represents any man who somehow survives an awful childhood without having his spirit broken, who plods through schooling that’s irrelevant to his needs and then drifts through low-paid casual work, and who serves his country in a war he doesn’t understand and is then punished for being on the losing side. Seethaler’s novella is more about the quiet heroism of an ordinary man just getting by in a world that doesn’t care about him at all. He leads a much more humble life, he has very few choices, and he loses the love of his life through a natural disaster not through any noble self-sacrifice. But (without in any way diminishing the integrity of either character), it seems to me that in A Whole Life Andreas Eggar is more of an Everyman. Stoner, a college professor, gives up the love of his life because in America at that time divorce would have destroyed not only his career but also hers – and that sacrifice would change them both in ways that would harm their love. I’ve seen it compared somewhere to Stoner by John Williams but although their principal characters share the same stoicism there isn’t the same sense of a life subordinate to self-sacrifice. It’s a very quiet book, a kind of elegy for a very quiet, solitary man. A Whole Life is an unusual book to be an international bestseller. ![]()
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