The Escape: A Novel [Hardcover]

Adam Thirlwell (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: March 30, 2010

Haffner is charming, morally suspect, vain, obsessed by the libertine emperors. He is British and Jewish and a widower. But Haffner’s attachments to his nation, his race, his marriage, have always been matters of conjecture. They have always been subjects of debate.

There are many stories of Haffner—but this, the most secret, is the greatest of them all. The Escape opens in a spa town snug in the unfashionable eastern Alps, where Haffner has come to claim his wife’s inheritance: a villa expropriated in darker times. After weeks of ignoring his task in order to conduct two affairs—one with a capricious young yoga instructor, the other with a hungrily passionate married woman—he discovers gradually that he wants this villa, very much. Squabbling with bureaucrats and their shadows means a fight, and Haffner wants anything he has to fight for.

How can you ever escape your past, your family, your history? That is the problem of Haffner’s story in The Escape. That has always been the problem of Haffner—and his lifetime of metamorphoses and disappearances. How might Haffner ever become unattached?

Through the improvised digressions of his comic couplings and uncouplings emerge the stories of Haffner’s century: the chaos of World War II , the heyday of jazz, the postwar diaspora, the uncertain triumph of capitalism, and the inescapability of memory.

The Escape is a swift, sad farce of sexual mayhem by a brilliant young novelist The New York Times has called “a prodigy and, as such, unstoppable.”

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Following the travails of aging libertine Raphael Haffner in a spa town somewhere in Bohemia, this unfortunate picaresque by Thirlwell (The Delighted States) quickly becomes a case study in which history (that arrogant personification), mythical references, and Haffner's own life don't inform one another so much as farcically cohabitate. Narrated by a younger, faceless acquaintance, the story of our epic hero drifts between Haffner's efforts to secure his dead wife's estate and his Sophoclean love for sexy young yoga instructor Zinka, or, more generally, the familiar, peristaltic illness of the women, as Haffner's ageing body is still a pincushion for the multicoloured plastic arrows of the victorious kid-god: Cupid. Within this landscape of tremulous picturesque mountains where anti-Semitic bureaucrats conspire to deprive Haffner of his inheritance, the arthritic Casanova offers many self-aggrandizing reflections punctuated by exclamation points. Unfortunately, Haffner's considerable shortcomings, while promising, never consolidate into a solid character, much less a mythical letch. His insights and motivations are stale and cartoonish, his vulnerabilities bland, and his slapstick strivings are those of a stick figure on Viagra. (Apr.)
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From Booklist

At the novel’s start, Haffner, 78, concealed in the wardrobe of young Zinka, the object of his desire, watches her administer to the needs of her boyfriend. Haffner, a successful banker, retired and widowed, is staying at a hotel in a spa town in the Alps, for the purpose of reclaiming a villa that had been confiscated from his late wife’s family during WWII. While on this noble mission, Haffner, a lover of women, can’t help but pursue this erotic adventure and, at the same time, share intimacies with the unhappily married Frau Tummel, another guest at the hotel. He jumps through hoops both in his attempts to bed Zinka and as he navigates the Kafkaesque bureaucracy of the former Eastern-bloc country he is visiting. Thirlwell’s novel is a tragic farce. His hero is undeniably bourgeois, yet fancies himself somewhat bohemian and deems the pleasures of his pursuits worthy of the degradations and humiliations he must suffer to obtain them. Haffner, a truly memorable character, is in classic denial, unfaithful to his wife, and most of all, to himself. --Ben Segedin

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 336 pages
• Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux; 1 edition (March 30, 2010)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0374148783
• ISBN-13: 978-0374148782
• Product Dimensions: 8.5 x 6.1 x 1.1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 2.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,476,319 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Clever, melancholic farce but less than engaging, July 16, 2010

By 

Ripple (uk) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Escape: A Novel (Kindle Edition)

Fans of Milan Kundera or Philip Roth will appreciate this clever, well written, melancholic farce of a story, but it's not a novel that engages the reader due to the lack of sympathetic characters.

When we first meet seventy-eight year-old Raphael Haffner, he is hiding in a spa hotel closet watching a twenty-something year-old yoga instructor (who knows he's there) having sex with her boyfriend (who doesn't). Haffner is a British, Jewish former banker who is staying at the spa in Central Europe while on a mission to reclaim his dead wife's villa that in nearby that was confiscated by the Nazis in the war. Thirlwell's narrator, some fifty years younger than Haffner (ie the age of the author) describes the aging libertine Haffner as "lustful, selfish, vain - an entirely commonplace man". Charming.

But it's not really a plot-driven novel. Interspersed with trying to develop two affairs - one with the ever flexible yoga teacher, Zinka, and another with a middle aged, married resident of the spa - with varying amounts of success, are Haffner's recollections about his Jewish childhood in North London, fighting in Africa in the war, his banking career and various loves including his deceased wife, jazz and cricket amongst other things.

I confess to being in two minds about this book. There are bits I enjoyed and bits I found terribly frustrating. Haffner is not a likeable character by any means and, as even one of his friends notes "Haffner always thought there was so much more to Haffner than anyone else ever thought". This is a bit of a problem. Haffner is a symbol of the greed and selfishness of modern-day life, but the overall tone of the book is that of a melancholic farce. There's much reflection on a life either lived or wasted, about the beauty of defeat and about escaping from your past.

On the plus side, the writing is highly intelligent in places, and Thirlwell shows great skill in his use of words, and the sex scenes - often so excruciating to read in novels - are genuinely funny. Thirlwell's first book, `Politics', gained something of a reputation for its sexual content and clearly this is a subject still very much on the author's mind. I found myself admiring the writing more than enjoying the book though. Partly because of the endless repetition of Haffner's name, I felt that I was kept at a distance from the story rather than being engaged in it.

If the name `Haffner' has made you think of a similarly named individual (and yes, the joke is made explicit in the book) then this also hints further at the `cleverness' of the writing. In a postscript to the book, Thirlwell identifies 46 writers from whom the book contains "quotations, some of them slightly adapted". This list includes, amongst others Thomas Mann, Groucho Marx, Leo Tolstoy, William Shakespeare and George Eliot. Academically, this is clever but perhaps it accounts for the slightly cold feeling I got from reading the book. In terms of style though, there are hints of several writers who I do like, including Milan Kundera, John Updike's Rabbit and Philip Roth's Portnoy, none of whom feature on Thirlwell's list. Thirlwell's writing isn't derivative as such, but the overriding sense was that he puts me in mind of some great authors without reaching that level himself ....yet.

At one point, the narrator muses "but no, just right now, I'm not quite in the mood for Haffner, and his confusions", and I'm afraid I sort of knew what he meant.

3 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars The Escape, June 13, 2010

By 

J. Michael (Lonely on Staten Island) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: The Escape: A Novel (Hardcover)

Save your time and money. After reading one-third of the book I still had no idea what was going on nor did I care. Fortunately I was able to return the book and received a refund.