num_pages: 336
description: Set in an unnamed time and place Brodeck blends the familiar and unfamiliar myth and history into a work of extraordinary power and resonance. Readers of J. M. Coetzee's Disgrace Bernhard Schlink's The Reader and Kafka will be captivated by Brodeck.Forced into a brutal concentration camp during a great war Brodeck returns to his village at the wars end and takes up his old job of writing reports for a governmental bureau. One day a stranger comes to live in the village. His odd manner and habits arouse suspicions: His speech is formal he takes long solitary walks and although he is unfailingly friendly and polite he reveals nothing about himself. When the stranger produces drawings of the village and its inhabitants that are both unflattering and insightful the villagers murder him. The authorities who witnessed the killing tell Brodeck to write a report that is essentially a whitewash of the incident. As Brodeck writes the official account he sets down his version of the truth in a separate parallel narrative. In measured evocative prose he weaves into the story of the stranger his own painful history and the dark secrets the villagers have fiercely kept hidden.
language: English
title: Brodeck
publisher: Nan A. Talese