Lost: A Novel - Hardcover

Treichel, Hans-Ulrich

3.02

1,383 ratings by Goodreads

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0375406271 ISBN 13: 9780375406270

Publisher: Pantheon, 1999

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A first novel hailed as Germany's most exciting fiction debut of last year, Lost walks us into what we think is familiar territory and then suddenly turns all our expectations upside down.

An ordinary German family flees from the advancing Russian army in 1945, makes it to safety, and starts over, painstakingly building a new life in the postwar economic miracle. But in the refugee trek west there was a victim, and that victim was their firstborn son, Arnold.

"Arnold isn't dead. He didn't starve, either," is what the little brother, the narrator of this story, is finally told by his parents when he is about eight years old. "I was only just beginning to understand that Arnold, my un-dead brother, had the leading role in the family, and had assigned me a supporting part." The search is on. Finding lost Arnold is his parents' dream. It is the little brother's nightmare.

Laconically distanced, often darkly and wickedly funny, Lost is the psychological and emotional roller coaster that follows, as seen through the eyes of the youngest and most subversive person in the novel. It is a brilliant debut.

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Review:

Although Hans-Ulrich Treichel has already published seven volumes of poetry and miscellaneous prose, his first novel has produced the biggest splash yet, both in his native Germany and abroad. Initially this seems a little surprising. Lost is a small book whose expressive resources are constricted on one side by the narrator's youth (he's 8) and on the other by his emotional range (from mild to deep perplexity). Yet Treichel's plot has an elementary and irresistible power. As we learn, the narrator and his parents are beneficiaries of the postwar German boom, now living in East Prussia. There is, however, a missing piece from this family portrait: an older brother, reluctantly abandoned to a bystander during the Russian advance in 1945. The parents are tortured by this fact, while the narrator, forced to study the single remaining photo of his sibling, takes a more laissez-faire approach:

Arnold was dead, which was certainly very sad, but it made it easier for me to deal with his photo. Happy, easygoing Arnold even struck a chord in me, and I was proud to have a brother who was dead and still looked so happy and easygoing. I mourned Arnold and was proud of him, and I shared my room with him and wished him all the milk in the world. I had a dead brother and felt I had been singled out by fate. None of my playmates had a dead brother, let alone one who'd starved to death while fleeing the Russians.

The narrator's pride in this low-impact relation evaporates, however, when his parents discover that Arnold may be alive after all. What follows is an eerie excursion to the Institute of Forensic Anthropology in Heidelberg, where the entire family is poked, prodded, and measured for evidence of consanguinity with "foundling 2307." This nutty procedure is straight out of Kafka, as is the utterly meaningless report that follows on its heels. Yet Treichel's musical, repetitive, unparagraphed prose owes much more to the late Thomas Bernhard, with whom he also shares a taste for black-comic vexation. For this reader, in fact, the comparison leaves Treichel slightly diminished: he lacks the sort of maniacal intensity that was always the true motor of Bernhard's art. Still, there's a great deal to admire in his tormented take on brotherhood--which could easily have been titled From Here to Fraternity--and Carol Brown Janeway's translation captures both the author's meticulous banality and his momentary, moving leaps into the tragic register. --James Marcus

From the Back Cover:

"A brilliant tragicomic story."--The New York Times

"Treichel's poetic genius allows the fertile ambiguities that Grass and Heinrich B�ll planted so adroitly a generation ago to water the guilt and obsession of this particular...family."--Los Angeles Times Book Review

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