October 30, 2023
Helfer’s touching second installment in a trilogy inspired by her family history (after Last House Before the Mountain) focuses on her WWII veteran father and his passion for books. Josef Helfer is conscripted straight out of finishing school into the German army near the end of the war. After he loses a leg due to frostbite, he marries his nurse, Grete. The couple settle in the Austrian mountains and raise four children. Monika, the second-oldest, narrates. As a young girl, Monika doesn’t understand Josef’s dedication to the extensive library he’s established in the Convalescent Home for the War-wounded, which he manages and where his family lives. After an official from the association that owns the home tells Josef that it will be remodeled and the library converted into two rooms for lodging, Josef fears losing his books. He removes the most valued volumes and hides them, thus risking his job and the family’s stability. Helfer’s introspective remembrances of her childhood, complete with anecdotal narratives of her relatives and glimpses of the love shared by her parents, breathe life into the characters’ simple moments of joy amid times of hardship. Helfer’s fans will appreciate her searching perspective on her father.
November 1, 2023
Award-winning Austrian author Helfer fictionalizes her own family history, continuing the story of her Bagage ("riffraff") relatives begun in Last House before the Mountain (2020). While Last House centered on the author's mother, Grete, here Helfer shifts focus to her father, Josef, whose deep love of books was born during his education for the clergy. After Josef is wounded in WWII and marries Grete, the family moves to the Austrian Alps so Joseph can manage the Convalescent Home for War-Wounded and the library he creates and nurtures. Helfer depicts an idyllic life among books, soldiers, and a phalanx of aunts and uncles, relating the fate of Josef's treasured books and the unraveling of her family in the voice of her girlhood self. Beautifully rendered in English by Davidson, Helfer's novel stirringly blurs the line between memoir and fiction, concluding with painful honesty, confiding her doubts about how well she knew her father. Fans of family sagas will appreciate Helfer's multifaceted tribute to the father who inspired her love of reading.
COPYRIGHT(2023) Booklist, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.
November 15, 2023
An impressive library represents all that's good in life to one Austrian World War II survivor who struggles with the aftermath of the war and the horrific injuries he sustained while fighting on the Eastern Front. Austrian writer Helfer explores the life of her father, Josef, in this work of autofiction. The child of a single mother--a maid in the household of his biological father--Josef is a bright child who grows up in poverty and, initially, without educational advantages. A local builder allows him access to his own home library, and Josef's lifelong love affair with books and libraries begins. Upon his return from the war, Josef eventually secures a position as the manager of an Alpine convalescent home for those disabled in battle. Central to his attachment to the facility is his love of its comprehensive library, which leads to seemingly impetuous decisions about its future (as well as his own). Helfer's unvarnished recitation of the circumstances her family endures in the wake of her father's acts of desperation provides a clear portrait of the unrelenting, continuing legacy of damage suffered by those permanently maimed by war. Helfer addresses the reader directly at several points, and the process of researching and writing her account of Josef's experiences is a visible part and parcel of the work. (Her stepmother, for example, wishes that Helfer would wait until after her death to write the account.) Deciphering the forces that informed her father's decisions, as well as his various disabilities, leads Helfer to examine their generalized effects on her family as well in this sobering account. Helfer's unrelieved portrait of a suffering soul wastes nothing on superfluous embellishment.
COPYRIGHT(2023) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.