It's 1989, and in a small town on the Austria-Hungary border, nobody talks about the war; the older residents pretend not to remember, and the younger ones are too busy making plans to leave. The walls are thin, the curtains twitch, there is a face at every window, and everyone knows what they are not supposed to say. But as thousands of East German refugees mass at the border, it seems that the past is knocking on Darkenbloom's door.
Expansive ... Menasse’s brilliance is to evoke the sense of interrelatedness while subtly and relentlessly refusing to plug the gaps ... Menasse pulls off the trick of making us experience the scrappy, gappy nature of history ... Though a master of detail...the author is also adept at writing incompleteness. ... n epic achievement that ought to take its place as an essential text of European literature, devastating in its portrayal of how atrocities are perpetuated and disavowed.
Eva Menasse’s spellbinding writing draws us into the heads of the Darkenbloomers and into the heart of village life ... Like a good thriller, the seemingly innocuous clues are drip-fed to the reader through her wonderfully rounded characters who are faced with the revelation of the truth when journalists arrive in the village ... Astute characterizations ... A gripping investigation of guilt, collective memory, and revelation, and each of Eva Menasse’s carefully crafted sentences, in Charlotte Collin’s sensitive translation, is worth dwelling upon, for they stay with you, long after you have finished the book.
Rich, omniscient knowledge of the characters, whose quirky humor and humanity amid an impeccable backdrop of clandestine forests and 'undulating, dappled' mountain views captivate ... Heralding the expansive disruptions of social change, the intricate novel Darkenbloom muses through an Austrian town’s troubled past.
