Effingers
by Gabrielle Tergit; translated by Sophie Duvernoy
If any novel deserves to be called epic, it’s EFFINGERS (New York Review Books, 853 pp., paperback, $29.95). Inspired by Tergit’s own family history, this account of the rise and fall of a German Jewish clan has an addictive immediacy that will make you reluctant to put it down, despite its intimidating bulk — and despite the historical storm clouds you know will be looming.
Mathias Effinger, a humble, pious watchmaker from a small town in southern Germany, provides the moral compass for the sprawling narrative, which begins in 1878 as his sons venture out into the wider world. In Berlin, Karl and Paul marry two of the daughters of the financier Emmanuel Oppner, gaining entry into the haute bourgeoisie as their factory evolves from the modest production of screws to the cutting-edge assembly of motor cars. At the same time, their wives chart diverging paths through an unsettlingly fractured society, whose baroque extravagance is an affront to the increasing poverty of the working classes.
World War I causes the first major disruption of the Effingers’ fortunes, but it’s the interwar years of personal and financial upheaval that will ruin them. Very soon, the petty rivalry of the family’s two matriarchs will be dwarfed by the devastating political skirmishes of 1930s Germany. By then, Paul will have long since abandoned his belief that industry can be “a blessing for mankind.” With his arrest by the Nazis comes tragic proof: Under its new National Socialist managers, the Effinger factory produces nothing but tanks.
The Last of Earth
by Deepa Anappara
The landscape of Tibet — “desolate and yet stunning; sacred, even” — is the most powerful player in Deepa Anappara’s THE LAST OF EARTH (Random House, 330 pp., $29), constantly foiling the plans of its desperate human characters. It’s 1869 when two expeditions set off for this land where foreigners have been forbidden entry. One is led by a British surveyor disguised as a priest, his skin stained with walnut juice. The other is much more modest: a young aspiring monk and the 50-year-old Anglo-Indian woman pretending to be his mother. The surveyor is intent on besting rival Russian and Swedish explorers; the bogus matriarch aims to become the first Western female to visit Lhasa. Neither is prepared for the ordeals that lie ahead.
The narrative proceeds along two occasionally intersecting paths, seen through the eyes of Balram, the surveyor’s Nepali “Compass-wallah,” who has signed on for a secret reason of his own, and those of Katherine Westcott, a travel writer guilt-ridden in the aftermath of her sister’s death who has unsuccessfully tried to lose herself in wanderlust and the study of Buddhist scriptures. Over the next few months, each comes to acknowledge “the illusory nature of what the mind deemed real.” Not to mention the illusory nature of human aspirations.
Canticle
by Janet Rich Edwards
A reluctant miracle worker is the heroine of Janet Rich Edwards’s CANTICLE (Spiegel & Grau, 368 pp., $30), which takes place in late 13th-century Bruges, a city roiled by spiritual ferment. “Half the town is challenging the legitimacy of the Church, grousing about corruption. Meanwhile, the other half grows ever more pious, wailing about the coming apocalypse.” Caught between them is a teenager whose prayers for a religious vocation don’t receive the answer she was hoping for.
Determined to avoid a forced marriage, Aleys begs for help from a Franciscan monk, who places her with an independent community of religious women called beguines, hoping she can use them to start an offshoot of his own order. But when her duties serving with them at a hospital for the poor yield a seemingly miraculous cure, she attracts the attention of the local bishop, who happens to be the monk’s far more worldly — and ambitious — brother. “I don’t know if it was real,” she insists. “It’s God’s will,” the bishop tells her. “I order you to believe.”
Hope and Destiny
by Niklas Natt och Dag; translated by Alex Fleming
Natt och Dag, best known for a historical crime trilogy set in 18th-century Stockholm called the Wolf and the Watchman, goes much farther back in HOPE AND DESTINY (Atria, 449 pp., paperback, $20), which features his 15th-generation grandfather, Magnus Bengtsson, whose part in a medieval uprising has been preserved in a Swedish chronicle written shortly after the death of its leader, Engelbrekt Engelbrektsson. It was a time when the region was just emerging from a devastating plague, when aristocratic clans jockeyed for influence and royal power was wielded by a foreign king based in Denmark.
At first confined to the mining region of the north, Engelbrekt’s defiance of the king’s bailiffs spreads among the populace, forcing the nobility to acknowledge his influence. And so, in 1434, Magnus’s father, although officially aligned with the court in Copenhagen, hedges his bets by sending his 17-year-old son to join Engelbrekt’s entourage. As the rebellion wears on, this move creates unexpected tests of loyalty — and a bond that may only be broken through violence.
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