Exiles Return (de Waal) - Book Reviews

Book Reviews
The Exiles Return has an immediacy that makes de Waal's readers feel the experiences of its characters in a visceral way....With the publication, after all these years, of The Exiles Return, we are allowed to hear a voice that has not only endured but, by the subtlety and fervor of its free expression, triumphed.
Andrew Ervin - New York Times Book Review


Elisabeth de Waal has assembled an unusual tableau—evocative and altogether memorable.... Here’s hoping that The Exiles Return will now find the American audience that it deserves.
Erika Dreifus - Washington Post

There is a distinctly fin de siècle feel to Elisabeth de Waal's rediscovered novel about Viennese exiles, banished by war, streaming back to their native city in the mid-1950s. The Exiles Return captures the atmosphere of post-World War II Vienna, with its crumbling buildings, decaying aristocracy, mercantile fervor and ideological denial. But its restrained prose style and preoccupation with the gap between public morality and private behavior evoke even more strongly the novels of Henry James, Thomas Hardy, Gustave Flaubert, Leo Tolstoy and other 19th-century masters.... The Exiles Return is both an oddity and the bittersweet legacy of a gifted writer, melding the narrative pleasures of fiction with a vivid historical snapshot.
Chicago Tribune


The Exiles Return is, in a sense, a reverie about what it meant to return to postwar Vienna; a dream turned nightmare of a family wanting to recoup its wartime losses….The Exiles Return, a novel of five exiles returning home after fleeing Hitler, is a masterpiece of European literature.
Buffalo News


[The Exiles Return] succeeds magnificiently on its own uncompromising terms...And in holding up a uniquely wrought mirror to [de Waal's] Vienna.
San Francisco Chronicle


Until Edmund de Waal, Elisabeth de Waal’s grandson, inherited “the yellowing typescript” of this historical novel, written in the 1950s, it languished and was untitled and unpublished in her lifetime. The setting is postwar Vienna.... While the novel’s prose is by turns lyrical and melancholy, and there’s much to be admired in this elegy to loss and return, the novel’s dramatic impact is ultimately thwarted by an operatic ending that betrays its age.
Publishers Weekly


Exile Kuno Adler, a fiftyish research pathologist now living in New York, decides to...return to his native Austria.... His homecoming coincides with that of two others.... Three stories eventually come together in a sensational conclusion.... This elegant novel should appeal to readers who admire the European stylishness of war-era books such as...Suite Francaise and ...Sarah's Key. —Barbara Love, Kingston Frontenac P.L., Ont.
Library Journal


[An] incisive, and tragic tale of bombarded and morally decimated postwar Vienna....De Waal's acid, eyewitness drama of malignant prejudice, innocence betrayed, the disintegration of the old order, and love transcendent has the same jolting immediacy as the novels of Irene Nemirovsky as well as deeply archetypal dimensions.
Booklist


An elegant, unpublished novel…This novel reveals [de Waal’s] intelligence and articulateness as it evokes 1950s Vienna, haunted by the ghosts of its distant and more recent pasts…. Restrained yet incisive, this finely observed novel lacks a resounding conclusion but nevertheless offers European mood music of a particular and beguiling resonance.
Kirkus Reviews