With a title like A Whole Life you’d be forgiven for expecting a much longer book. It’s the economy of Seethaler’s prose that allows him to fit so much into so few pages (149), and what a beautifully quiet story it is. Reminiscent in sentiment and pace of that ever popular Williams classic Stoner and comparable in content and tone to Train Dreams by Denis Johnson with a similar seam of sadness weaving through the prose, this is a restrained and unpretentious piece of fiction.
Forest and mountain man Andreas Egger’s life is the one we follow through this miniature epic. Starting with his attempt to rescue an almost dead local goatherd, Seethaler returns to reveal the beginning and then the rest of Egger’s life with such a deftness and lightness of touch that you almost don’t realise you are reading, it feels as though the story is being orally related, like an old friend is acquainting you with the relatively uneventful tale of a mountain dwelling loner. And here’s the thing with this book; other than a devastating avalanche and a period of internment in Russia during the war nothing much else of earth shattering consequence happens. Yet the landscape descriptions and mountain village life portrayed in these pages draws the reader in more than many blockbusting tomes can.
There is also something slightly mystical and ethereal about parts of this book, particularly near the end, which made me think deeply about what it must be like to be old, alone and sometimes confused, how it would be very likely and understandable to start hearing and seeing ghosts from your past.
After living through Egger’s life with him, his choice of retirement abode is unsurprising if a little unorthodox, but absolutely the right place for him to spend his remaining days. His ending befits his life, and for this I was grateful to Seethaler for not writing Egger an overly dramatic or morose demise; it is a quiet understated end just as he had lived his life.
A Whole Life is beautifully written, beautifully translated by Charlotte Collins and beautifully packaged by Picador (swoon at that cover), I absolutely loved it and I’d like to think you will too.
(I think that’s 11 sentences – need to get a grip!)
A Fiction Habit 
The irony of A Little Life vs A Whole Life
I haven’t read the former, but loved the latter, which reminded me a little of Julio Llamazares The Yellow Rain, which is a similar elegiac treatment of village life, focused more on the end of life and the demise of an abandoned village one man refuses to abandon, in the Spanish Pyrenees, told in a gentle literary style.
I WAS expecting a big book, like A Little Life (ironically), when I clicked through to read your post. I’m not a visualizer so I shy away from books with a lot of descriptions of landscape, but you’ve got me interested in this one, which I hadn’t heard of before!
It is beautiful!
This was one of my favourite books from last year. You nailed it in your first paragraph – so much said in so few words. I loved the way it ended too.
Thanks Susan. Great it’s been shortlisted for the MBInternational too.