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17 of 20 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Magnificent!, May 28, 2001
With this incredible debut novel, Wray leaps onto the literary stage fully mature, with a book so polished and assured that lovers of great writing will be celebrating this book for a long time. Wray shows no uncertainty. He has total control of his dramatic raw material--the rise of the Nazis in Austria, the Dollfuss Affair, and the Anschluss--and he never once stoops to sensationalism, never pushes any of those easy anti-Hitler buttons, never loses his characters in the intensity of the action, and never lets us forget that Hitler's rise was possible because ordinary people allowed it to happen.
As the book opens, Oskar Voxlauer, is returning to Austria after twenty years in the Ukraine, where he has lived following his desertion from the horrors of Isonzo in World War I. His Socialist ideals have crumbled in the face of the communist reality, his lover has died, and he hasn't seen his family or his former home since he was seventeen. Unable to adjust to the changes which have taken place in Niessen, he finds work in the mountains as a gamekeeper for a Jewish friend, occasionally visiting the town and his somewhat dotty mother. Although Oskar finds love in the mountains with Else Bauer, he sometimes worries about his stability, suffering from occasional hallucinations and panic attacks and sometimes reacting violently to the injustices he sees and feels. He finds comfort in nature, even when the Nazi menace begins to threaten him, his relationship with Else, and his Jewish friend, Pauli Ryslavy.
The lively third person narrative alternates wth Oskar's poignant and lengthy memories from his past--in the Ukraine and in the Austria of twenty years ago. When Else's cousin, Kurt Bauer, a high-ranking SS official, arrives, a new point of view opens, as Bauer, too, contributes reminiscences--about the growth of his Nazi commitment, the killing of Austrian Chancellor Dollfuss, and his plans for a Nazi Austria. These interior monologues are incredibly powerful, highlighting the similarities and contrasts in the lives of Oskar and Bauer, both ordinary people who have been caught up in different political movements, committed to them for different reasons.
Putting all the politics into perspective are some of the most lyrical and gorgeous extended descriptions of nature you'll ever read-including butterflies with their "parchment-like wingbeats," two fox cubs, one of which "held the spine of a trout in its teeth like a diadem," and even inkpot toads, with their "bright yellow undersides [that] bled a dark, poisonous-looking ink from tiny vents along their ribs." This is a successful novel on every level, and it is not far-fetched to read of comparisons between it and Joseph Roth's earlier Austrian masterpiece, The Radetzky March. Mary Whipple
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7 of 8 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
agree with the NYTimes, June 18, 2001
By A Customer
This book is stunning. I wasn't really interested in the subject matter to tell the truth (don't care for historical novels in general - I'm more interested in how writers portray their own eras), but picked it up anyway because of the rave review in the NYTimes. Not really sure how he pulled it off, but it's an incredible and beautifully written book. I'd like to see what the author can do with a 21st century setting.
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8 of 10 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
strangley distanced, affectless examination of pre-Holocaust, January 27, 2003
This review is from: The Right Hand of Sleep: A Novel (Paperback)
John Wray, in his debut novel, "The Right Hand of Sleep," has chosen several ambitious topics to explore: the rise of facism in a sleepy Austrian town, its impact on the town's population and the response of a "Lost Generation" soldier to the post World War I period. Lofty goals, however, do not make a novel successful. "Sleep" is eerily emotionless; its protagonist fails to elicit either sympathy or identification, and the author's style is alternately dense or elipitical. Though the novel deserves praise for its attempted illumination of the causation of facism's appeal in rural Austria, its narrative is sapped by excessive and unnecessary descriptive passages and vitiated by shallow characterizations. "Sleep" focuses on the moral degradation and consequent alienation of its protagonist, Oskar Voxlauer. Debased and scarred by his front-line experiences during World War I, Oskar emerges as a quintessential representative of blighted youth. Shorn of frivolous idealism, Oskar nevertheless tries to reconcile his repressed hope for a coherent life with his silent resignation to the cruelty of the world and the absolute irrelevance of politics. Indeed, Oskar's passivity and unwillingess to accept personal risk for ideas (even for defending one of his few friends, a Jewish tavern-keeper, from the facist onslaught) is part naturalist impotence, part stoic refusal to acknowledge pain and part selfish desire to lead an invisible life. Regardless of Oskar's motivation to avoid direct confrontation with life, he disdains any political movement as unworthy of commitment. After all, his own life's experiences, as a soldier for a purportedly noble cause, as a companion to a Ukranian woman under the iron grip of Bolshevik excesses or as a irrelevant gamekeeper to his Jewish friend's landholdings, have proven the worthlessness, even the danger, of adherence to ideas. Unfortunately, the banality of evil as the cause of facism is not groundbreaking philosophy. Wray's single greatest failure is to shed any new light on this perception. The people who surround Oskar never receive adequate depth. Even his Nazi adversary, Kurt, fails to arouse much disgust. Ironically, Mr. Wray, in writing about disaffection, disillusion and lack of connection, composes his work in much the same vein. If that weren't disappointment enought, his publisher, Alfred A. Knopf, permits him to use an absolutely arcane method of dialogue, one which requires the reader to not only wonder who is speaking, but when and if the spoken word has begun or concluded. The simple and proper usage of quotation marks would have made "Sleep" more comprehensible. Equally confusing is Wray's inexplicable replacement of Oskar's valuable first-person flashbacks mid-way through the novel with those of the Nazi Kurt. What is a successful and thoughtful inclusion becomes an irrelevancy. "The Right Hand of Sleep" proves that works about Nazism, Jew hatred, and the rise of facism are not easy compositions. Despite the rich possibilities of dealing with the horrific loss of dignity and conscience of raw recruits in World War I, the novel never maintains dramatic tension or serious character development. Consequently, this well-intentioned work falls far short of its hopes.
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