The Search for Heinrich Schlögel: A Novel - Softcover

Baillie, Martha

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1935639900 ISBN 13: 9781935639909

Publisher: Tin House Books, 2014

Synopsis

Brimming with the creativity behind David Mitchell's masterpiece Cloud Atlas in a far north setting, The Search for Heinrich Schlogel is a sophisticated story with magical underpinnings.

Martha Baillie’s hypnotic novel follows Heinrich Schlögel from Germany to Canada, where he sets out on a solo hike into the interior of Baffin Island. His journey quickly becomes surreal; he experiences strange encounters and inexplicable visions. Time plays tricks on him. When he returns to civilization, he discovers that, though he has not aged, thirty years have passed. Narrated by an unnamed archivist who is attempting to piece together the truth of Heinrich’s life, The Search for Heinrich Schlogel dances between reality and fantasy. Heinrich’s story, as it unfolds, in today’s disappearing North, asks us to consider our role in imagining the future into existence while considering the consequences of our past choices. Brimming with the creativity behind David Mitchell’s masterpiece Cloud Atlas in a far north setting, The Search for Heinrich Schlogel is a sophisticated story with magical underpinnings.

About this title

About the Author

Martha Baillie is the author of four novels and has been published in Canada, Germany, and Hungary. Her poems have appeared frequently in journals such as Descant, Prairie Fire, and the Antigonish Review. Her nonfiction piece “The Legacy of Joseph Wagenbach” was published by Brick: a literary journal. Her most recent novel, The Incident Report, was a Globe and Mail Best Book and was long-listed for the Giller Prize. She lives in Toronto.

Review

"Baillie reminds us of the power of novels to renew the world."
Booklist

"Baillie delivers a work of magical realism that captures the experience of postcolonial guilt...and gives voice to a silenced past."
Starred and boxed Publishers Weekly

"Baillie is an excellent storyteller, combining adventure with deeper elements and the characters’ search for self. Highly recommended."
Library Journal

Oprah lists The Search for Heinrich Schlögel as one of the 13 books to pick up this September:

"Bewitching riddle of a novel."
O, the Oprah Magazine

Martha Baillie has written a timeless masterpiece. Every page is full of haunting wonderment. Truly, I know of no novel quite like it it’s a blessing. The Search for Heinrich Schlögel has dreamlike locutions, it tells the most unusual tale, and it brings the margins of the world to us with photographic immediacy. I was completely transported.”
Howard Norman, author of Next Life Might Be Kinder

"How is it possible to find a person who doesn’t know he's missing? How can we be entangled in the world, in history, and live a moral life? Heinrich Schlögel doesn't give up his secrets easily, but as time collapses and opens, an extraordinary person, and an astonishing reading experience, come into existence. Martha Baillie’s new novel is entirely original, remembered yet created, truthful yet fictional, old, alive and visionary."
--Madeleine Thien, author of Dogs at the Perimeter

"The Search for Heinrich Schlögel is utterly distinctive, a fictional biography that drifts so imperceptibly into dream that it's impossible to tell where the reality of it ends and the fantasy begins. There's something of Nabokov here, and also something of Rip Van Winkle. Baillie has written an ode to those things that resist time, like a photograph, and those things that relinquish themselves to it, like a painting, resulting in a novel that is itself a little bit of both."
Kevin Brockmeier, author of The Illumination

Capacious, capricious, mischievous, The Search for Heinrich Schlögel moves like a quantum experiment, defying boundaries of time, place, chronology. Fluid as light itself, animated by startling imagery, vivid and peculiar characters, The Search for Heinrich Schlögel is a hymn to brooding memory, the enduring need to inhabit story, and a haunting insistence upon endless possibilities within possibility. That is to say, hope.”
Gina Ochsner, author of The Russian Dreambook of Color and Flight

"Martha Baillie’s extraordinary The Search for Heinrich Schlögel is not quite like any other book I’ve read. It invites us on a hallucinatory journey to the Arctic and through time. It asks us to live with mystery and wonder, which is what a work of art does. If it reminds me of anything, it is the fabulous, shape-shifting novels of the Icelandic writer Sjón."
Catherine Bush, author of The Rules of Engagement and Accusation

Praise for The Incident Report (longlisted for the 2009 Giller Prize and one of the Globe and Mail’s Best Books of 2009)

Baillie’s novel contains real tenderness, rendered in beautiful prose with compelling restraint.”
Quill and Quire

Baillie is a naturally figurative writer and, through precise and concrete imagery, captures, paradoxically, what is simply too much for measured words.”
Globe and Mail

Praise for The Shape I Gave You

Baillie’s style is articulate, elegantly nuanced and replete with allusions to artists and thinkers . . . The counterpoint of pleasure and pain is moulded by memory and Baillie does an excellent job of showing how memory creates the past and the present. The Shape I Gave You is exquisitely genuine . . . Baillie’s examination of emotion is unfaltering in its deep compassion.”
Globe and Mail

[An] old-fashioned quality . . . gives Baillie’s work its charm and elegance. Her stories have weight and value history. . . . Baillie’s made a strong statement on the pain of grief and the unexpected way in which compassion can be sown. She’s also shown that with each new novel her voice becomes stronger.”
NOW (Toronto)

About this edition

• Publisher: Tin House Books
• Publication date: 2014
• ISBN 10: 1935639900
• ISBN 13: 9781935639909
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 352