A panoramic novel of European history, by an internationally bestselling writer.
The whole truth, as the name implies, is the collective knowledge of all those involved. Which is why you can never piece it together again properly afterwards. Because a few of those who possessed a part of it are always already dead. Or lying, or their memories are bad.
It’s 1989, and in a small town on the Austria–Hungary border, nobody talks about the war; the older residents pretend not to remember, and the younger ones are too busy making plans to leave. The walls are thin, the curtains twitch, there is a face at every window, and everyone knows what they are not supposed to say.
But as thousands of East German refugees mass at the border, it seems that the past is knocking on Darkenbloom’s door.
Still, though, nobody talks about the war.
Until a mysterious visitor shows up asking questions.
Until townspeople start receiving threatening letters and even disappearing.
Until a body is found.
Darkenbloom is a sweeping novel of exiled counts, Nazis-turned-Soviet-enforcers, secret marriages, mislabelled graves, remembrance, guilt, and the devastating power of silence, by one of Austria’s most significant contemporary writers.
‘It is Menasse’s style—which is to say, the way she uses her narrator—that makes the case for her deep and original reimagining of history. This teasing, searching, playful, scathing voice, half inside the community and half outside it, sometimes as bland as soup and other times as sharp as death, recounts history as no responsible historian could.’
-- James Wood The New Yorker‘Darkenbloom uses the historical case of Rechnitz to investigate the nature of guilt and remembrance, repression and confession, public memory and public amnesia more broadly … Menasse is, above all else, an astute observer of human psychology. Her novel’s narration roams between characters, whose chunks of worldview and life story form a panorama of the town’s haunted present alongside moments where the author-narrator addresses the reader with direct commentary on the Darkenbloomers or reflections on the nature of memory itself … In Menasse’s thoughtful hands, the invented town of Darkenbloom is not a cipher for one specific historical event, but rather a stage to explore more universal concerns.’
-- Alexander Wells The Guardian‘A novel of great ambition and achievement.’
-- Nick Rennison The Sunday Times‘Darkenbloom is an epic achievement that ought to take its place as an essential text of European literature, devastating in its portrayal of how atrocities are perpetuated and disavowed.’
-- Kate McLoughin TLS‘The Holocaust novel can sometimes feel like an exhausted genre, but as the far Right rises once again in Austria, this glittering novel beautifully refreshes it.’
-- Claire Allfree Daily Mail‘A deft thriller offering an unsettling look at brutal legacies.’
-- Eithne Farry Mail on Sunday‘Menasse (Vienna) delivers an immersive, gloom-ridden tale of an Austrian town’s secrets and tensions in the months before the fall of the Berlin Wall … This unsettling novel offers a singular sense of place.’
Publishers Weekly‘In Eva Menasse’s historical novel Darkenbloom, the wartime secrets of a small Austrian town are compromised by the urgent demands of the present … disturbing events are tempered by rich, omniscient knowledge of the characters, whose quirky humour and humanity amid an impeccable backdrop of clandestine forests and “undulating, dappled” mountain views captivate. Heralding the expansive disruptions of social change, the intricate novel Darkenbloom muses through an Austrian town’s troubled past.’
-- Foreword Reviews, starred review‘Journalism is quick, but literary art takes time. I have often wondered where it is, the great epic of complicity. Now it’s finally here. Darkenbloom is a nice idyllic small town, but we gradually find out what each of its inhabitants did back then and what they subsequently deleted from their memories. Darkenbloom is truly one of the great European novels of our time, one that sets standards for how fiction can treat history.’
-- Daniel Kehlmann, author of Tyll‘Eva Menasse has produced a masterpiece … While none of these motifs that Eva Menasse invokes are new, it feels like you’re experiencing them here for the first time in Technicolor and Dolby Stereo. How does she do this? Entirely through language. And that is why Darkenbloom is a novel that will last … As a novel, Darkenbloom is both a gripping linguistic thrill and a thriller — a thriller about coming to terms with the past. Until the very end, you want to know who knew what, and what they covered up or hushed up. The way Eva Menasse spreads this information throughout the novel in such a way that every word dropped at the beginning is resolved at the end and the suspense grows page after page is absolutely masterful … Eva Menasse’s novel is a stroke of genius.’
DIE ZEIT‘Spellbinding … Each of Eva Menasse’s carefully crafted sentences, in Charlotte Collin’s sensitive translation, is worth dwelling upon, for they stay with you, long after you have finished the book.’
World Literature Today‘Darkenbloom stirs up, saddens, pulls you along — especially through its characters and is undoubtedly one of the most important books of this fall. Great.’
NDR‘Not a reunification novel, nor a key novel: Eva Menasse’s new novel Darkenbloom is something better. In a bitterly comic way, it turns a historical event into the background of a small-town portrait in 1989 … But where is Darkenbloom’s third master builder, besides God and the Devil, the novel’s author? She’s there just two sentences later in all her sarcasm: “You wish God could only see into the houses and not the hearts.” Only literature should dare to look into dark souls. Literature like this.”’
FAZ‘Eva Menasse has succeeded in writing an unobtrusively dense novel that lets the silence roar. One cannot escape it.’
Kurier‘She found the motto of the third part of this exciting, eventful, and always different book that goes up against a great thundering silence and repression in Robert Musil: “Historical is that which one would not do oneself.” Literature can speak of more than simple truths. In this beautiful case, it makes clear how opposites clash even in the most intimate community. It may be that the great world theatre takes place elsewhere. The swamp of mysteries, one learns in this great and never long-winded book, “has always exceeded those of solved cases many times over.”’
-- Mannheimer Morgen‘Camouflage and exposure, mystery and malice, memory and life lies, historical lies, the colportage of lies of an entire country … all this is presented lightly and in an anxiety-inducing satirical manner, which on the one hand brings the characters close to the audience and on the other exposes those who allow themselves to be seduced by them. An ambitious, ravishingly mocking narrative project, impressively mastered by Eva Menasse.’
-- Literaturhaus Wien‘[Eva Menasse] succeeds in packing the horror into a beautiful, almost warm-hearted language — without, of course, trivialising it. Her laconic language is sometimes reminiscent of that of Wolf Haas, her characters, especially the red-nosed drunkards, are drawn with such precision as if they had sprung from a cartoon by the Lower Austrian Manfred Deix. Darkenbloom is an eerie as well as funny novel about dealing with the past. Where some people struggle with it and where the wounds do not heal, others drink their past away until the memory of it fades.’
Badische Zeitung‘With Darkenbloom, author Eva Menasse presents an eloquent anti-homeland novel, very much in the tradition of other works by Austrian authors who throw coarse-grained salt into those same open wounds and watch with great pleasure as everything ferments and pops and bursts … Menasse dishes it out hard. But she does so in a quiet, often witty tone that exposes the inner life and the power struggle of these turncoat villagers of Darkenbloom all the more perfidiously. One of the great strengths of the novel lies in the very fine ramifications, the ends of the bloodlines that have permeated the fictional Darkenbloom for a hundred years.’
NZZ‘Eva Menasse has created a worthy literary monument to Austria’s politics of the past.’
Falter‘Utterly gripping and unforgettable days later.’
-- Jennifer Lipman The Jewish ChronicleEva Menasse was born in Vienna in 1970 and has lived in Berlin for over twenty years. She began her career as a journalist, and has published several bestselling novels and short story collections, as well as essay collections. Her accolades include the Heinrich Böll Prize, the Friedrich Hölderlin Prize, the Jonathan Swift Prize, the Austrian Book Prize, the Ludwig Börne Prize, and a fellowship at the Villa Massimo in Rome. Her books have been translated into numerous languages and have sold 500,000 copies.Charlotte Collins studied English Literature at Cambridge University and worked as an actor and radio journalist in Germany and the UK before becoming a literary translator. Her co-translation, with Ruth Martin, of Nino Haratischvili’sThe Eighth Life won the Warwick Prize for Women in Translation, and in 2017 she was awarded the Goethe-Institut’s Helen and Kurt Wolff Translator’s Prize for Robert Seethaler’s A Whole Life. Other translations include Seethaler’s The Tobacconist, Homeland by Walter Kempowski, and Olga by Bernhard Schlink.
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