The Quiet Twin

by Dan Vyleta

Overview

Vienna, 1939. Professor Speckstein's dog has been brutally killed, the latest victim in a string of unsolved murders in the area. Speckstein wants answers-but these are uncharitable times, and one must be careful where one probes...
When an unexpected house call leads Doctor Beer to Speckstein's apartment, he finds himself in the bedroom of the professor's flirtatious niece, Zuzka. From her window, the girl gives Beer a view of their apartment block that he has never known. Across the courtyard there is nine-year-old Anneliese, the lonely daughter of an alcoholic. Five windows to the left lives a secretive mime who comes home late at night and keeps something - or someone - precious hidden from view. From the garret drifts the mournful sound of a trumpet player, and a basement door swings closed behind the building's inscrutable janitor.
Does one of these enigmatic neighbors have blood on their hands?
Doctor Beer, who has his own reasons for keeping his private life hidden from public scrutiny, reluctantly becomes embroiled in an enquiry that forces him to face the dark realities of Nazi rule. Thrilling and deftly told, The Quiet Twin explores a dystopian world of social paranoia, mistrust, and fear-and the danger of staying silent.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781608198283
Publisher:	Bloomsbury Publishing
Publication date:	02/21/2012
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	384
File size:	1 MB

About the Author

Dan Vyleta is the son of Czech refugees who emigrated to Germany in the late 1960s. He holds a PhD in History from the University of Cambridge. His first novel, Pavel & I, was published to international acclaim. He lives in Wisconsin.

Editorial Reviews

Vyleta carefully lays out the elements of a traditional mystery—colorful, secretive neighbors as suspects, a corrupt police officer as a foil to the hero's investigations—and finds clever ways to subvert expectations. Though he proves adept at deploying the requisite red herrings and other plot mechanics, Vyleta's use of his historical setting emphasizes a broader point about the way Nazism perverted justice and decency on even the smallest scale.
—The New York Times Book Review

Andrew Haig Martin

[Vyleta is] the heir of the throne left empty since the death of Graham Greene. Yes, he’s that damn good.”

San Francisco Book Review

Beer is both an anomaly and the norm: a perceptive mind subdued by sour principles; a compassionate heart in a cowardly body. When push comes to shove, as it nearly always does, what good are thoughts against brute force?…Nimble, nuanced, fierce, scrupulous, [The Quiet Twin] makes a good case for the power of such thoughts.”

Times Literary Supplement (London)

Vyleta builds an atmosphere of fear and paranoia…With The Quiet Twin, he proves he’s no one-book wonder.”

Globe and Mail (Toronto)

Vital, deftly realized characters populate Vyleta’s simmering narrative…The Quiet Twin is a sharp and confident novel that captures the social paranoia and mistrust fomented by Nazism…Subtly engaging.”

Independent (London)

A compelling rumination on watching and watchfulness, served up with Nabokovian glee.”

Guardian (London)

I was pleased to encounter the dark excitement of Dan Vyleta’s The Quiet Twin…As in Hitchcock’s Rear Window, paranoia mounts…[A] tense, well-wrought novel.”

Wall Street Journal

Vyleta carefully lays out the elements of a traditional mystery…and finds clever ways to subvert expectations.”

New York Times Book Review

As Vyleta weaves his taut narrative, readers strive with Beer for that acuteness of vision necessary to anticipate and explain the ominous twists of events played out in the shadow of Nazi fanaticism. Dark and disturbing, a novel of rare sophistication.”

Booklist (starred review)

Vyleta’s second novel is truly a work of art; his deft manipulation of narrative and characters (and readers), a master class in psychological sleight of hand.”

National Post (Toronto)

The novel pungently recreates the noxious ethos in which [Nazism] flourished, resembling Hitchcock’s Rear Window rescripted by Dostoevsky and Kafka.”

Sunday Times (London)

Innocence and cunning, humour and pathos, sacrifice and cruelty—all operate side by side in a world gone wrong in this breathtaking page-turner.”

Winnipeg Free Press

A striking, pitch-perfect, wonderfully atmospheric, and beautifully written ensemble piece that subtly portrays a society on the brink of moral collapse.”

Sunday Telegraph (London)

The residents of a Viennese neighborhood intersect over illness, murder and an increasingly intimidating Nazi presence. The second novel by Canadian novelist Vyleta (Pavel & I, 2008) is purposefully claustrophobic: Taking place over the course of a few weeks in 1939, the story rarely shifts from an apartment building where everybody seems to be sick or deeply eccentric. The sole exception is Dr. Anton Beer, the novel's hero, who's soon managing the concerns of three troubled women: Zuzka, a teenager whose claims of paralysis may just be a plea for romantic attention; Lieschen, a 9-year-old whose father is an alcoholic brute; and Eva, who genuinely suffers from paralysis, with the sickening bedsores to prove it. To this discomfiting milieu Vyleta adds a supporting cast of eccentrics, including Eva's brother, a cabaret performer, and a Japanese trumpeter who's creepily observant of the neighborhood's goings-on. The core plot involves a series of murders in the area, and Beer is increasingly pestered by a Nazi investigator looking for a patsy to attach to the crimes. But this book isn't so much a murder mystery as a mood piece about how paranoia escalates as a totalitarian regime comes to power, and some of the novel's best scenes underscore Dr. Beer's anxiety as a result of the growing surveillance of the apartment. Beer doesn't quite have the depth of character to carry the novel, unfortunately; over time, his stoic demeanor makes him seem less like a defiant hero than a passive blank. But Vyleta knows how to create an oppressive atmosphere without making the prose feel bogged down, and the novel's closing chapters pick up energy, revealing the evil of the Nazis and the ability of a few committed people to push back against it. An evocative if largely grey-toned portrait of life in a new police state.

Kirkus Reviews