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Opposites attract, and Helmut Holk and Christine Arne, the appealing married couple at the center of this engrossing book by one of Germany's greatest novelists, could not be less alike. Christine is a serious soul from a devout background. She is brooding and beautiful and devoted to her husband and their two children. Helmut is lighthearted and pleasure-loving and largely content to defer to his wife's deeper feelings and better wisdom. They live in a beautiful large house overlooking the sea, which they built themselves, and have been happily married for twenty-three years--only of late a certain tension has crept into their dealings with each other. Little jokes, casual endearments, long-meditated plans: they all hit a raw nerve. How a couple can slowly drift apart, until one day they find themselves in a situation which is nothing they ever wished for but from which they cannot go back, is at the heart of this timeless story of everyday life. Theodor Fontane's great gift is to tell the story effectively in his characters' own words, listening to how they talk and fail to talk to each other, watching them turn away from their own true feelings as much as from each other. Irretrievable is a nuanced, affectionate, enormously sophisticated, and profoundly humane reckoning with the blindness of love.… (more)
User reviews
This book has a lovely setting. Helmut and Christine live in a beautiful home they built on a cliff overlooking the sea. And Fontane writes beautiful characters and situations with precision and insight. I really enjoyed this book. Recommended for readers who enjoy this era.
The pacing is exquisite. The characters reveal themselves primarily through dialogue and are only minimally explained by the omniscient narrator. The story moves slowly, each scene adding to the plot but never feeling forced or functional.
Were I a teacher of fiction, I would dissect this book. It is a touchstone that makes Madame Bovary seem clumsy in comparison.