Customer Reviews

The Right Hand of Sleep: A Novel

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4 star:		(1)
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1 star:		(1)

 

 

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

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.

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.

This is a very good novel about Austria in the late 1930s. The protagonist is a man returning from almost 20 years exile in the Soviet Union, a former deserter from the Imperial Austro-Hungarian Army. He returns to the small rural town where he grew up and where his mother still lives. There, he becomes caught in the Nazi seizure of power and in a romantic triangle that involves a local woman and the local Nazi leader. The treatment of the hero, his life, and his personal entanglements have strong allegorical aspects related to Austrian history in the first half of the 20th century. Accompanying these allegorical elements are sustained efforts at a complex psychological novel involving analysis of both the hero and this opponent. Finally, there is a good deal of outstanding descriptive writing describing the local countryside. This is a dense and ambitious work with a great deal to recommend it. At times, however, all the elements don't cohere. Some of the psychological elements sometimes seem unfocused. As noted above, this is the first published novel by John Wray and I look forward to reading his work in the future.

Oskar Voxlauer is born in 1902 in the Austrian province of Carinthia. At age 16, he is drafted and sent to the Isonzo battlefront in the Dolomites. He deserts and wanders east, coming to a stop in the Ukraine. There, he spends the next twenty years on a communist colchose before returning to his small village in Carinthia. Together with Else, he moves to a lonely cottage where he works as a game keeper. It is now 1938.

Germany is under Nazi rule, and the clouds drift towards Austria. The first messenger is Kurt, Else's cousin, who just returned from a two-year stay in Berlin. We now get the first run-ins between the former Bolshevik and the Nazi. More and more events come to a head. Austria becomes part of Germany, and Kurt shows up in the uniform of a SS officer. Else, guarding her own secrets, is placed in the middle between the two combattans.

Wray wrote a magnificent book, not painting Oskar all good, nor Kurt all bad. It is a most plausible story that shows in clear and absolutely accurate detail what actually happened in those days. It is a textbook of history enveloped in a gripping story. That Wray makes mistakes in the naming of the SS ranks can easily be forgiven.

This is a book for the younger generation to learn from, and for the older generation to rediscover. But I do wonder if there was a purpose to placing the action in Carinthia, probably the only western region nowadays under the government of a dedicated Nazi (Joerg Haider).

When this book was given to me by a friend, who insisted on sitting next to me and watching while I began it, I read the first few paragraphs with trepidation. But as soon as I'd begun paying attention to the book and not to her, I realized I had something actually and truly incredible in my hands. The book simply opened up like a long, well-lit room filled with beautiful things, and drew me into it... really magical. I'd read the ecstatic review in the N.Y. Times, but I'm a born skeptic, and might never have read the book if my friend hadn't ambushed me with it. But she did, and I couldn't be more grateful. (Reading over this review, I realize it sounds like I'm on John Wray's payroll, so I will say it seemed the novel was cut down from a longer, more epic romance.) At any rate: I plunged into the novel in earnest that afternoon, and by the day after, I'd finished it completely and was sorry to find it over so soon. All in all, a shimmering, seductive, rustling ballgown of a book! My wife is reading it now and I find myself spending half my time at home peeking over her shoulder. Unforgettable!

I got this book as a gift from a colleague I don't know particularly well, and began reading it without any great expectations. As soon as I finished it I felt I had to review it somewhere, because a novel this gripping and graceful doesn't come along very often. I was blown out of the water by this brilliant literary thriller! It's sexy, it's romantic, and it has the seed in it of truly timeless art and thinking. Like the best of Hemingway (who this young author could be the reincarnation of) the book even wears its flaws like bloody badges of honor. A novel of this caliber, that brings a forgotten time back to screaming life and makes that time and the lives, loves and fears of the people who lived it more real to the reader than his own time and place, achieves greatness. Reading this novel is like taking a bath in the ocean after six weeks of travelling across the dryest desert. In other words, true delight.

I'm not really one for writing this sort of thing, so I'll keep it short. The book is a wonder, and made a week-long business trip that promised to be endless and dull pass like half an hour on a beautiful 1930's train, rushing through the Alps, with a mysterious, charismatic passenger in the seat just across from mine. Part thriller, part continental romance, I recommend this book for anyone who has a heart (with half a brain attached to it).

I have read many reviews about The Right Hand of Sleep and agree that it is a remarkable book. I found the most interesting our heroes realization that each form of government which he lived under was unsatisfactory starting with Germany in World War I, the Soviets following the war and finally the Nazis.Each denied the right of individual freedom. Nowhere did he as one lone individual manage to live without the system forcing its will on him. This man was not heroic nor did he wish to be; he wanted to live his life as he saw fit and "they" wouldn't let him. He posed no threat to any society except trying to be a person without boundaries. As we have found in our society, to some extent, the right to be different, to live a life outside the structure of philosophical and political restraints is difficult. The era of the 60's and 70's a case in point. After I finished I went back re-reading to delve into the tortured soul of the man.

All of the 5 star reviews and the NY Times review express my excitement about this book. They all ignore the core of this moving work, however. This is a story about who becomes a fascist and who fights fascism. True, it is also a love story, a story about the 20th century in Europe, a story about life between the wars in an Austrian village; but it is first a consideration of self-serving or altruism, seizing one's own best chance or insisting on one's beliefs even if they are not popular. Powerful and completely convincing, this is a fable for us now.