Irretrievable
Subtitle: Afterword by Phillip Lopate
By: by Theodor Fontane ; introduction by Phillip Lopate ; translated [from the German] by Douglas Parmée
Contributors: Parmée, Douglas
Edition: translation formerly published as Beyond Recall by Oxford University Press "The World's Classics" #602
Series: New York Review Books classics
Publisher: New York Review Books
Published: 2011
Place of publication: New York
Language: eng
Translation of: Unwiederbringlich
Format: Paperback
Number of pages: 288
ISBN-13: 9781590173749
Copyright date: 1964
Work titles: Unwiederbringlich
Description: Opposites attract, and Helmut Holk and Christine Arne, the appealing married couple at the center of this engrossing book by one of Germany{u2019}s greatest novelists, could not be less alike. Christine is a serious soul from a devout background. She is brooding and beautiful and devoted to her husband and their two children. Helmut is lighthearted and pleasure-loving and largely content to defer to his wife{u2019}s deeper feelings and better wisdom. They live in a beautiful large house overlooking the sea, which they built themselves, and have been happily married for twenty-three years{u2014}only of late a certain tension has crept into their dealings with each other. Little jokes, casual endearments, long-meditated plans: they all hit a raw nerve. How a couple can slowly drift apart, until one day they find themselves in a situation which is nothing they ever wished for but from which they cannot go back, is at the heart of this timeless story of everyday life. Theodor Fontane{u2019}s great gift is to tell the story effectively in his characters{u2019} own words, listening to how they talk and fail to talk to each other, watching them turn away from their own true feelings as much as from each other. Irretrievable is a nuanced, affectionate, enormously sophisticated, and profoundly humane reckoning with the blindness of love. --