The Exiles Return
Elisabeth de Waal, 2014
Picador
336 pp.
ISBN-13: 9781250045782
Summary
With a foreward by Edmund de Waal, author of The Hare with the Amber Eyes . . . Set in the ashes of post-second World War Vienna, a powerful, subtle novel of exiles returning home fifteen years after fleeing Hitler's deadly reign.
Vienna is demolished by war, the city an alien landscape of ruined castles, a fractured ruling class, and people picking up the pieces. Elisabeth de Waal’s mesmerizing The Exiles Return is a stunningly vivid postwar story of Austria’s fallen aristocrats, unrepentant Nazis, and a culture degraded by violence.
The novel follows a number of exiles, each returning under very different circumstances, who must come to terms with a city in painful recovery. There is Kuno Adler, a Jewish research scientist, who is tired of his unfulfilling existence in America; Theophil Kanakis, a wealthy Greek businessman, seeking to plunder some of the spoils of war; Marie-Theres, a brooding teenager, sent by her parents in hopes that the change of scene will shake her out of her funk; and Prince “Bimbo” Grein, a handsome young man with a title divested of all its social currency.
With immaculate precision and sensitivity, de Waal, an exile herself, captures a city rebuilding and relearning its identity, and the people who have to do the same. De Waal has written a masterpiece of European literature, an artifact revealing a moment in our history, clear as a snapshot, but timeless as well. (From the publisher.)