A revealing View

Robert Seethaler is an Austrian writer I discovered in one of my recent trips. While browsing books from the curated list in a German Airport Book store, ( Which I do every time when I go to a new city or Country ) I was immediately hooked by the Simple story line. I immediately filed this in my to list.

Soon after returning, I started reading his "The Tobacconist" on my Kindle when I realized that I had bought this book sometime back and had not read it yet. From the start, the images those simple lines evoked were magical. The Translation by Charlotte Collins is so refreshingly smooth. It has managed to catch all the "Austro-German" Nuances that oozes out of Seethaler's narration. The Language and the images it evoke, sometimes Funny, sometimes Poignant, is very strong and dazzling.

If you want to read a fine, Nuanced international literary work in recent times without much of exertion, I would strongly recommend you this book. In 240+ pages, this is a beautiful work, ever relevant. The story is coming of age of a young, simple adolescent village boy from Salzkammergut and that of Nazi Austria meeting each other in a crossroad, all happening in Vienna. The story happens around the fateful time of Anschluss of Austria into the Hitler's Third Reich around 1938. The Portrayal of Sigmund Freud is a strong metaphor for Jewish state of affairs during that time. History points to the fact that Sigmund Freud, an Austrian and Connoisseur for Fine Cigar, besides being a revolutionary Psychologist, had to face the bad end of the Nazi inquest and his family left Austria forever.

At a glance, this beautifully written and excellently translated book looks like any of those million books written about the Holocaust and feeds the collective western guilt on jews. But this book definitely is not!

For couple days after I finished the book, something kept nagging my thoughts like a piece of food particle stuck between the teeth at an uncomfortable place. Something told me, after all those that I had missed an important point.

Then it dawned on me what Seethaler is actually talking about. So subtly nuanced and so beautifully narrated! He has walked a fine edge without raising the Zionist heckles that could have easily branded him anti semitic!

Holocaust is a scourge on human race and cannot be just lumped into a problem of the Jews alone. Nazi holocaust figures by Zionist estimate is about 6-8 million Jews ( apparently, 2/3 of estimated Jewish population across the world). However the total holocaust human deaths are estimated even by a conservative estimate as 11-17 million! And I am not including those lives lost in war related activities, both Directly and Indirectly. I went and reconfirmed these numbers after this book kept disturbing me.

So I think that the holocaust has to be understood as an attack on whole of humanity and not just against Jews. While most literary fictions present the Jewish cause, there are rarely any that talks about the Holocaust Victims who were dumped into terminal Concentration Camps and never saw the light of the day ever. And that is the point he is raising in this book.

Fantastically written, Finely translated Nuanced work that offers a tasteful Reading for those who want a book that could be cherished for a long time.