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by Ralf Rothmann (author), Shaun Whiteside (translator)
The lunacy of the final months of World War II, as experienced by a young German soldier.
Distant, silent, often drunk, Walter Urban is a difficult man to have as a father. But his son - the narrator of this slim, harrowing novel - is curious about Walter's experiences during World War II, and so makes him a present of a blank notebook in which to write down his memories. Walter dies, however, leaving nothing but the barest skeleton of a story on those pages, leading his son to fill in the gaps himself, rightly or wrongly, with what he can piece together of his father's early life.
This, then, is the story of Walter and his dangerously outspoken friend Friedrich Caroli, seventeen-year-old trainee milkers on a dairy farm in northern Germany who are tricked into volunteering for the army during the spring of 1945: the last, and in many ways the worst, months of the war. The men are driven to the point of madness by what they experience, and when Friedrich finally deserts his post, Walter is forced to do the unthinkable.
Told in a remarkable impressionistic voice, focusing on the tiny details and moments of grotesque beauty that flower even in the most desperate situations, Ralf Rothmann's To Die in Spring "ushers in the post–[Günter] Grass era with enormous power" (Die Zeit).
"Starred Review. Searing, haunting, incandescent: Rothmann's new novel is a vital addition to the trove of wartime fiction." - Kirkus
"Starred Review. Directly confronting issues of responsibility, accountability, and legacy, this is an undeniably powerful work." - Publishers Weekly
"Starred Review...Rothmann bravely insists that readers consider questions of culpability, of how ordinary Germans could be both perpetrators and victims. The result is a quietly unsettling triumph for Rothmann, who is well-known for his novels of working-class life." - Booklist
This information about To Die in Spring was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Ralf Rothmann was born in 1953 in Schleswig and grew up in the Ruhr valley. He has received numerous awards for his fiction and poetry, including the Friedrich Hölderlin Prize in 2013, the Hans Fallada Prize in 2008, and the Max Frisch Prize in 2006. He lives in Berlin.
Shaun Whiteside is a Northern Irish translator of French, Dutch, German, and Italian literature. He has translated many novels, including Manituana and Altai by Wu Ming, The Weekend by Bernhard Schlink, and Magdalene the Sinner by Lilian Faschinger, which won him the Schlegel-Tieck Prize for German Translation in 1997.
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