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starladyWaal, Elisabeth de. The Exiles Return. London: Persephone Books, 2013. [1950s]
I wasn't going to write about this book when I first started reading it--as you may have noticed, I don't write much about books anymore here. But as I went along I found that there were a few things I wanted to flag. This novel, complete in manuscript but unpublished during the author's lifetime, follows three Viennese exiles who each return to Austria in 1954, about a year before the State Treaty that restored Austria's sovereignty and enshrined it as a neutral nation for the duration of the Cold War--though as the narration observes, everyone knew that the country was culturally Western and would remain so. Kuno Adler is a middle-aged Jewish scientist who fled in the 1930s and who is able to return to a steady job at his old institute thanks to the country's restitution laws. Theophil Kanakis is a fabulously wealthy Greek businessman who also fled in the 1930s for reasons that remain unclear but which could range from homosexuality to general principles to the recognition that there would very soon be very few places with decent restaurants untouched by the war. Marie-Theres Larsen is the nineteen year-old Protestant daughter of an Austrian princess and a Danish scientist who became convinced that the Nazis were going to go to war and got out early enough that their relations made fun of them. Although they are all different kinds of exiles, all of them, uncoincidentally one suspects, found refuge in America and go back for their own reasons.
There's a lot in here that offers reflections on de Waal's own biography; she was born Elisabeth von Ephrussi, fabulously wealthy and Jewish in late 19thC Vienna, and she managed to get her family to England in the 1930s, including her parents after the Anschluss; she was also a PhD, although in humanities rather than STEM. I believe her husband may actually have been Protestant; he was certainly Scandinavian. Her brother, who was gay, served in the American military during the war, which took him to Japan, where he met his lifelong partner and settled permanently; he gained American citizenship but renounced it late in life. Even more remarkably, after the war de Waal returned to Vienna and filed papers to recover most of her family's stolen art collection, which was then sold at auction--one suspects the little speech by the antique dealer (himself a Jewish returnee) about having purchased objects from the collection of "Baron von E—" legally at a postwar auction is drawn from life, as is the anecdote about the opera singer who dared to call Goebbels a murderer to his face in 1943 but somehow survived. The family's history is traced in Edmund de Waal's The Hare with the Amber Eyes, and Edmund wrote the introduction to this novel.
I have actually been to Vienna, and enough of the inner city has survived the redevelopment in the offing in the novel that some of the locations are still recognizable. The Viennese attitudes that Edmund de Waal explicated in his book are also evident in this work. Specifically, I was really bemused to see that…well, are other people familiar with the feminist critique of Freud that he invented psychotherapy as a way to gaslight his female patients about their fathers' sexual abuse? This has always made a lot of sense to me, but it was really brought home as definitely a thing that happened by the way that Marie-Theres' mother simply begins wondering about her husband's potential incestuous attachment to their daughter (there is no sign in the narrative that the husband, the aforementioned research scientist, actually does have any thoughts in this direction--for one thing, he's Danish), apparently as a matter of course. And then when Marie-Theres does go to Austria and stays in the countryside with her mother's younger sister and their family at their castle, with much narrative commentary on her part-Scandinavian long-legged beauty, her uncle actually does begin ostentatiously embracing her closely and attempting to kiss her goodnight on the mouth every night. There is no sign that Marie-Theres' aunt finds anything out of the ordinary about this, but Marie-Theres and the narrative both seem deeply uncomfortable. Welp, as they say. Welp.
As for the novel itself, it is satisfying, though I personally could have done with more psychological explication of several of the supporting characters, particularly Bimbo, who remains something of a cipher and who consequently drags the whole Theophil plotline (which eventually intersects with the Marie-Theres plotline) down somewhat. I was also somewhat surprised to see Kuno Adler actually come face to face with an actual Nazi; there is definitely a spirit of telling some things as they are that permeates the book. At any rate, I'm glad I finally picked up the book, and I am definitely interested in de Waal's other unpublished novel that has been brought out by Persephone Books.
I wasn't going to write about this book when I first started reading it--as you may have noticed, I don't write much about books anymore here. But as I went along I found that there were a few things I wanted to flag. This novel, complete in manuscript but unpublished during the author's lifetime, follows three Viennese exiles who each return to Austria in 1954, about a year before the State Treaty that restored Austria's sovereignty and enshrined it as a neutral nation for the duration of the Cold War--though as the narration observes, everyone knew that the country was culturally Western and would remain so. Kuno Adler is a middle-aged Jewish scientist who fled in the 1930s and who is able to return to a steady job at his old institute thanks to the country's restitution laws. Theophil Kanakis is a fabulously wealthy Greek businessman who also fled in the 1930s for reasons that remain unclear but which could range from homosexuality to general principles to the recognition that there would very soon be very few places with decent restaurants untouched by the war. Marie-Theres Larsen is the nineteen year-old Protestant daughter of an Austrian princess and a Danish scientist who became convinced that the Nazis were going to go to war and got out early enough that their relations made fun of them. Although they are all different kinds of exiles, all of them, uncoincidentally one suspects, found refuge in America and go back for their own reasons.
There's a lot in here that offers reflections on de Waal's own biography; she was born Elisabeth von Ephrussi, fabulously wealthy and Jewish in late 19thC Vienna, and she managed to get her family to England in the 1930s, including her parents after the Anschluss; she was also a PhD, although in humanities rather than STEM. I believe her husband may actually have been Protestant; he was certainly Scandinavian. Her brother, who was gay, served in the American military during the war, which took him to Japan, where he met his lifelong partner and settled permanently; he gained American citizenship but renounced it late in life. Even more remarkably, after the war de Waal returned to Vienna and filed papers to recover most of her family's stolen art collection, which was then sold at auction--one suspects the little speech by the antique dealer (himself a Jewish returnee) about having purchased objects from the collection of "Baron von E—" legally at a postwar auction is drawn from life, as is the anecdote about the opera singer who dared to call Goebbels a murderer to his face in 1943 but somehow survived. The family's history is traced in Edmund de Waal's The Hare with the Amber Eyes, and Edmund wrote the introduction to this novel.
I have actually been to Vienna, and enough of the inner city has survived the redevelopment in the offing in the novel that some of the locations are still recognizable. The Viennese attitudes that Edmund de Waal explicated in his book are also evident in this work. Specifically, I was really bemused to see that…well, are other people familiar with the feminist critique of Freud that he invented psychotherapy as a way to gaslight his female patients about their fathers' sexual abuse? This has always made a lot of sense to me, but it was really brought home as definitely a thing that happened by the way that Marie-Theres' mother simply begins wondering about her husband's potential incestuous attachment to their daughter (there is no sign in the narrative that the husband, the aforementioned research scientist, actually does have any thoughts in this direction--for one thing, he's Danish), apparently as a matter of course. And then when Marie-Theres does go to Austria and stays in the countryside with her mother's younger sister and their family at their castle, with much narrative commentary on her part-Scandinavian long-legged beauty, her uncle actually does begin ostentatiously embracing her closely and attempting to kiss her goodnight on the mouth every night. There is no sign that Marie-Theres' aunt finds anything out of the ordinary about this, but Marie-Theres and the narrative both seem deeply uncomfortable. Welp, as they say. Welp.
As for the novel itself, it is satisfying, though I personally could have done with more psychological explication of several of the supporting characters, particularly Bimbo, who remains something of a cipher and who consequently drags the whole Theophil plotline (which eventually intersects with the Marie-Theres plotline) down somewhat. I was also somewhat surprised to see Kuno Adler actually come face to face with an actual Nazi; there is definitely a spirit of telling some things as they are that permeates the book. At any rate, I'm glad I finally picked up the book, and I am definitely interested in de Waal's other unpublished novel that has been brought out by Persephone Books.