I enjoyed Hare With The Amber Eyes so much I wanted to see if the story telling is hereditary. I liked the story. It wasn't what I thought it would be, the tone was much lighter than I had anticipated. I also do not approach it with the history or connection to the tale that others do. So it may seem far more dark to others. It was an only novel and never published when the author was alive, so there wasn't any chance to tweet the story in the publishing process. But considering (I assume) it is her first run of it, I liked it. Worth my time and probably yours. ( )

I'm not sure if this would have been published if it hadn't been for de Waal's grandson Edmund and the very amazing Hare with the Golden Eyes. It doesn't quite hang together as a novel.

But as a picture of post-war Vienna and some of the issues the city's returning or remaining population faced, it's quite fascinating.

Warning: there is a predatory homosexual stereotype that may make your eyes roll back in your head. ( )

Sehr schön geschrieben. Evoziert Gefühle und Eindrücke die mich sehr an "Effi Briest" erinnern. Mir gefielen auch die Nuancen des österreichischen Deutsches im Vergleich zu typischem Deutsch. ( )

The Exiles Return - Elisabeth de Waal

An Austrian professor travels by train from Paris to Vienna. The closer he gets the more anxious he becomes. As he travels though Switzerland he tells himself it's not too late, he can get off, visit a Swiss colleague and say that was his reason for travelling. He has left his wife and children back in the States. She was deeply opposed to his making this trip, and he is having difficulty getting used to the idea that he doesn't need to justify himself to her, that he is free to do as he chooses. The train connections to Central Europe have only recently been restored, and Professor Adler is returning to the city of his birth, the city he had to flee. His wife had adapted well to life in America, and established a successful business making lingerie for rich American women whom she rejoices in humiliating as they stand naked before her. The professor, however, yearns for his old home and the life he left behind, but like all who return to old homes, he has not anticipated change. When his train pulls in to Western Station the station building is no longer there. The once bustling beautiful city is now empty, dirty, and shattered.

"As he walked along its pavements, it aroused in him that curious ambivalent sensation which one experiences in dreams, that of knowing where one is and not knowing, of recognition and non-recognition, of the comfortingly familiar and the terrifyingly strange - the sensation of deja vu: am I really myself, experiencing this, or has it all already happened a long time ago?"

Disoriented to the point of nausea Adler walks the streets like an automaton.

"Finally, there he was on the Ring: the massive pile of the Natural History Museum on his right, the ramp of the Parliament building on his left, beyond it the spire of the Town Hall, and in front of him the railings of the Volksgarten and the Burgplatz. There he was, and there it all was: though the once tree-bordered footpaths across the roadway were stripped, treeless, only a few naked trunks still standing. Otherwise it was all there. And suddenly the dislocation of time which had been dizzying him with illusions and delusions snapped into focus, and he was real, everything was real, incontrovertible fact. He was there, Only the trees were not there, and this comparatively trivial sign of destruction, for which he had not been prepared, caused him incommensurate grief. Hurriedly he crossed the road, entered the park gates, sat down on a park bench in a deserted avenue, and wept."

The new social fabric of the city is as difficult to adjust to as the physical. The city is still under the Allied Occupation. Under the law of reparation anyone wishing to return would be reinstated to the same or equivalent post to the one he had held before if he had been dismissed or forced to resign because of his political views or his race or religion. Adler imagined he could come back and take up where he had left off, but life is not that simple. de Waal charts the awkwardness and suspicion attendant upon the return of the Jewish refugee. The Austrians are afraid of what the Jews may seek to reclaim, they are embarrassed by their history. Adler cannot help wondering about them. To someone who has declared his wartime past Adler says "It is a satisfaction to me to have met one self-confessed unrepentant Nazi. There must be many of them. Where have they got to? They all seem to have disappeared. One goes about amongst people, wondering. It is so harassing to have to suspect, looking for signs, listening for unpremeditated revealing remarks, and perhaps being unfair to people whom one may have wrongly suspected." de Waal illustrates the fear of being suspected when an estate agent goes to great lengths to establish that pictures on his wall were legitimately obtained with proper provenance.

Adler's is not the only return, however. Theophil Kanakis, a member of Vienna's small but wealthy pre-war Greek community, is seeking a small palais, something he feels he must once have seen, or heard described, an opulent little gem of a building in which he can assemble beautiful things and people. He has seen that other cities sustained far more damage than Vienna, but he fears that redevelopment will destroy its essence. An exile at one remove, Marie-Therese Larsen is the American born daughter of an Austrian princess. Remote and curiously naive, Marie-Therese goes to Austria to spend time with her mother's family, where she begins to find a kind of peace. Kanakis adds the girl to his collection, with tragic results.

The stories of Kanakis and Marie Therese seem to have been forced into an uncomfortable marriage with that of Adler.

Elisabeth de Waal was the grandmother of Edmund de Waal and readers of The Hare With The Amber Eyes will recognize the autobiographical roots of this novel, which was not published in her lifetime.

A small note: royalties from the sale of this Persephone book go to the Refugee Council.

Elisabeth de Waal grew up in an affluent Viennese family, rescuing her parents from the Anschluss in 1938 and returning after the war to a very different country (a story brilliantly told in her grandson Edmund's memoir, The Hare with Amber Eyes). Her novel, The Exiles Return, grew out of that experience. de Waal introduces several "exiles" in post-war Vienna: Kuno Adler, a scientist returning from America; Theophil Kanakis, a wealthy Greek businessman, Prince Lorenzo Grein-Lauterbach (aka Bimbo) and his sister Nina, who lost their parents to the Nazis, and young Marie-Theres (aka Resi), an American of Austrian descent visiting her aunt. Their stories, initially completely disconnected, slowly weave together. The storyline is straightforward, even simplistic, but the plot exists only to support the character studies, and exploration of exile and its effects on the human spirit. I found Edmund de Waal's account of his family's war experience more action-packed and compelling, and it made this novel more interesting because I understood the events framing the author's point of view. ( )