the result is a book at once searing and utterly unsentimental, a historical epic that doesn’t attempt to hide the fact that it is being written in the twenty-first century, decades after the events.Ī crystalline translation by Anthea Bell. What’s remarkable is that Kempowski recounts this grave story almost in a spirit of lightness, with a slightly ironic distance and a quiet, steady humor. What an amazing book this is: it was excitedly put into my hands by a writer friend, and I’ve been handing it on, in turn, to anyone who’ll listen to me. I encountered one masterpiece this year-Walter Kempowski’s epic novel All for Nothing. walter kempowski anthea bell jenny erpenbeck Yet in the main, life continues as banal, wondrous, and complicit as ever for the family, until their caution, their hedged bets, and their denial are answered by the wholly expected events they haven’t allowed themselves to imagine.Īll for Nothing, published in 2006, was the last novel by Walter Kempowski, one of postwar Germany’s most acclaimed and popular writers. As the road fills with Germans fleeing the occupied territories, the Georgenhof begins to receive strange visitors-a Nazi violinist, a dissident painter, a Baltic baron, even a Jewish refugee. Auntie runs the estate as best she can since Eberhard von Globig, a special officer in the German army, went to war, leaving behind his beautiful but vague wife, Katharina, and her bookish twelve-year-old son, Peter.
The von Globig family’s manor house, the Georgenhof, is falling into disrepair. In East Prussia, January 1945, the German forces are in retreat and the Red Army is approaching. February 2018 selection for the NYRB Classics Book Club.
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