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Snow Country: SUNDAY TIMES BESTSELLER

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The stories of Lena and Anton are beautifully described as they journey through their pre-middle age lives encountering adversity in upbringing, the horrors of war and loss, but making a place for themselves in the world nevertheless. Faulks even borrows Kawabata’s famous first line to describe Lena’s arrival at the Schloss: “The train came out of a long tunnel into snowfields.

review: Snow Country, by Sebastian Faulks - The Scotsman Book review: Snow Country, by Sebastian Faulks - The Scotsman

Poor soul” – a sentiment echoed at the end, when one character says of his future children: “Poor things. Rudolf is a conflicted soul in many ways, he’s a political idealist at a time of huge change and through him we see that it’s not looking good for democracy in Austria by 1933.

There are some good fairly brief scenes in the trenches and some quite graphic medical scenes which shows the frantic and difficult conditions of field hospitals. Faulks's 2009 novel, A Week in December, takes place in the seven days leading up to Christmas in December 2007. Europe had been split into two increasingly antagonistic power blocs since the 1871 unification of Germany, with Austria and France on firmly opposite sides.

Snow Country by Sebastian Faulks Book Review | Frost Magazine Snow Country by Sebastian Faulks Book Review | Frost Magazine

Their lives move apart over the years but come together again in 1934 at the atmospheric snow-capped sanatorium Schloss Seeblick, where human suffering is laid painfully bare but there remains a chance to rebuild broken lives. The Financial Times and its journalism are subject to a self-regulation regime under the FT Editorial Code of Practice. Disappointed first by her father and then by the idealistic lawyer who persuades her to come to Vienna, she takes a job at the Schloss Seeblick where her mother once worked as a cleaner. Even the First World War, which Faulks treats with such sensitivity in Birdsong, is strangely defanged in this new work. Even the First World War is strangely defanged in this new workSo packed with information is Snow Country’s whirlwind tour of almost thirty years of European history that it rarely leave itself room to examine those events’ human costs.He has since published eight novels, the most recent being Where My Heart Used to Beat (2015), Paris Echo (2018) and Snow Country (2021). I read this book very quickly as I wanted to know what happened, so I then reread it to enjoy Sebastian Faulks' lovely writing. Snow Country, like the turbulent interwar years in which it is set, is more provisional, less sure of its ground. Instead of taking Anton’s recourse to such intellectual non-sequiturs to be emotional evasion, as one might expect a psychotherapist to do, Martha is so impressed by their originality that she loses all professional composure and “let[s] her enthusiasm ride over her reserve. Sebastian Faulks always gets the intimate details of history right and with novels such as Birdsong, Charlotte Gray and now Snow Country he has set a standard so high it will be a long time before any novelist will equal him.

Austrian Trilogy by Sebastian Faulks - Goodreads Austrian Trilogy by Sebastian Faulks - Goodreads

The historical context is done well, we get a real sense of places and their atmosphere and the political changes are conveyed clearly. In Pasadena, my wife and I climbed Mount Lowe to inspect the ruins of a mountain railway installed as part of a failed tourist attraction in 1893.

In this beautiful story, we are introduced to Anton, a young man in Vienna before WW1, working as a low paid journalist and tutor. Snow Country is the second in Sebastian Faulks’s slow-burning, loosely connected trilogy of Austrian novels. Faulkes’ ability to stitch together grand themes and sweeping page-turning narrative together with the innermost feelings of truly believable characters is truly impressive.

Snow Country by Sebastian Faulks | Waterstones

This is history as sight-seeing, akin to green-screening Tom Hanks into newsreels of President Kennedy.

The action moves between Vienna and a psychiatric hospital, where the new theories of Freud are a strong influence on treatment. In 1934, an editor commissions him to report on the Schloss Seeblick, the psychiatric clinic outside Vienna which Drs Jacques Rebière and Thomas Midwinter established in the first book of Faulks’s “Austrian trilogy”, Human Traces (2005).

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