A moving study of how all lives boil down to a handful of choices, often made by others. This is a quietly profound novel made all the more beautiful by its brevity.
Description
From Robert Seethaler, the International Booker Prize finalist for A Whole Life and bestselling author of The Tobacconist, comes a tale of life and death and human connection, told through the voices of those who have passed on.
The Field is the oldest part of the cemetery in Paulstadt, where some of the small town’s most outspoken residents can be found. From their graves, they tell stories. Some recall just a moment — perhaps the one in which they left this world, perhaps the one they now realize changed the course of their life forever. Some remember all the people they’ve been with, or the only person they ever loved. This chorus of voices — young, old, rich, poor — builds a picture of a community, seen from below ground. The streets of the sleepy provincial town are given shape and meaning by those who lived, loved, worked, mourned, and died there.
The Field is a constellation of human lives — each one different yet connected to countless others — that shows how existence, for all its fleetingness, still has profound meaning.
Reviews
Seethaler paints a multi-faceted picture of a small town through the stories of the troubled souls lying in its cemetery ... Carefully crafted moments of catharsis ... hit you with all the force of a freight train.
If the dead were to talk among themselves, what would they discuss? Life, of course ... In twenty-nine chapters of unequal length — from two words (but what words!) to twenty pages — each devoted to a person who has lived in the small town of Paulstadt since the end of the Second World War, Seethaler brings lives to life, revealing their secrets, hopes, regrets, and joys ... There are premonitions. There are memories. Both can deceive. What is not deceptive, however, is the talent of Robert Seethaler.
One of those rare novels that can move you existentially, and change you.