Lost Book

Narrated from the point of view of a young boy, Hans-Ulrich Treichel's Lost is an extraordinary and bitterly humorous novel of a child's alienation, and a moving meditation on guilt, the power of memory and the warping effects of loss.Fleeing from Poland in 1945 to escape the Russian army, a German couple lose their child, Arnold. Arnold's younger brother is brought up in a home permeated with grief and believing his older brother to be dead--until one day he is told of what actually happened: I was only just beginning to understand that Arnold, my un-dead brother, had the leading role in the family and had assigned me a supporting part. I also understood that Arnold was responsible from the very beginning for my growing up in an atmosphere poisoned with guilt and shame. From the day of my birth, guilt and shame had ruled the family, without my knowing why. All I knew was that whatever I did, I felt guilty and ashamed as I did it. Obsessed with tracing their lost son, the parents neglect his younger sibling, who suffers in the shadow of his parents' distracted affections: the child before them supplanted by the memory of the child not there.At times the younger brother (who remains unnamed, echoing his lack of presence in the family) sounds like a childishly aware Samuel Beckett narrator, and it is this which prevents the book from being an unremittingly gloomy study of alienation. Always the outsider, always ignored, Arnold's brother observes his parents, the stultifying world of provincial post-war Germany, the hopeless procedures of official searches and scientific testing, with a darkly deadpan comic eye. The book is often extremely funny, lingering on the absurd rituals of bourgeois pieties and the miserable commandments of thrift and business--but at the same time the book builds to a powerful and traumatic climax. In Lost Treichel has given us a novel that speaks profoundly both of the emotional sterility of a family marked by absence and of the strange psychic landscape of Germany after World War II. --Burhan TufailRead More