The Crooked Maid: A Novel

by Dan Vyleta Narrated by Kate Reading

Overview

Graham Greene meets Dostoevsky in a thrilling and atmospheric story of guilt and restitution set in postwar Vienna.

Vienna, 1948. The war is over, and as the initial phase of de-Nazification winds down, the citizens of Vienna struggle to rebuild their lives amid the rubble.

Anna Beer returns to the city she fled nine years earlier after discovering her husband's infidelity. She has come back to find him and, perhaps, to forgive him. Traveling on the same train from Switzerland is eighteen-year-old Robert Seidel, a schoolboy summoned home to his stepfather's sickbed and the secrets of his family's past.

As Anna and Robert navigate an unrecognizable city, they cross paths with a war-widowed American journalist, a hunchbacked young servant girl, and a former POW whose primary purpose is to survive by any means-and to forget. Meanwhile, in the shells of burned-out houses and beneath the bombed-out ruins, a ghost of a man, his head wrapped in a red scarf, battles demons from his past and hides from a future deeply uncertain for all.

In The Crooked Maid, Dan Vyleta returns to the shadows of war-darkened Vienna, proving himself once again "a magical storyteller, master of the macabre" (David Park).

Editorial Reviews

From the Publisher

Gracefully executed . . . Dramatic.” —The New York Times Book Review

“A true storyteller who is also a prose stylist.” —The National Post

“Farcical, Kafkaesque . . . should appeal to fans of . . . Heinrich Böll.” —Publishers Weekly

“A psychological novel . . . [It] conjures up the stifling atmosphere of shame and deception of the postwar period and hints at escape through Vienna's own 'talking cure'—openness and honesty.” —Booklist

“Conveys the sparse, foreboding mood of Poe or Dostoevsky . . . Vyleta masterfully weaves his characters together in the light and shadow of war-torn Vienna.” —Shelf Awareness (starred review)

Kirkus Reviews

A dour excursion into a pocket of postwar Vienna, shaped by parricide, lost loves and remnants of Nazi malevolence. This sequel to Vyleta's 2012 novel, The Quiet Twin, moves the action from pre–World War II Vienna to 1948, as two people return to the city: Robert, a young man trying to uncover why his stepfather was thrown to his death from a window of the family home, and Anna, who wants to locate her long-missing husband, the doctor at the center of the previous novel. Robert's old home is occupied by a nightmarish cast of characters: His mother is lost in drugs and alcohol and unwilling to part with her portrait of Hitler; his stepbrother, Wolfgang, stands accused of murdering his father; and Wolfgang's wife is a study in ignorant lassitude. The home is being cared for--or barely so--by Eva, the hunchbacked maid of the title, who bitterly mocks Robert's efforts to understand what's happened. Life at Anna's old home is only marginally better, as her efforts to locate her husband bring her into the orbit of a U.S. expat journalist and an earnest ne'er-do-well, as well as Robert, with whom a semblance of romance blossoms. As in The Quiet Twin, Vyleta piles on intersecting characters but not always to useful effect; if Eva is meant as a symbol of the degradations of a decade under the Nazis' iron hand, she's too unlikable and too absent from much of the narrative to do the job well. Wolfgang's trial gives the novel a lift, encapsulating the mood of bloodlust and suspicion that seems to consume the city. But the multiple plot vectors dampen the story; by the time the fate of Anna's husband finally becomes clear, it registers little emotional effect. Vyleta conjures an appropriate landscape of gloom and ruin and sends too many people off to wander in it.

Product Details

BN ID:	2940169864915
Publisher:	Blackstone Audio, Inc.
Publication date:	08/06/2013
Edition description:	Unabridged

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