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Happily married with two children and a comfortable home in a Swiss town, Thomas and Astrid enjoy a glass of wine in their garden on a night like any other. Called back to the house by their son's cries, Astrid goes inside, expecting her husband to join her in a bit. But Thomas gets up and, after a brief moment of hesitation, opens the gate and walks out. No longer bound by the ties of his everyday life--family, friends, work--Thomas begins a winding trek across the countryside, exposed as never before to the Alpine winter. At home, Astrid wonders where he's gone, when he'll come back, whether he's still alive. Following Thomas and Astrid on their separate paths, To the Back of Beyond becomes ultimately a meditation on the limits of freedom and on the craving to be wanted.… (more)
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He walks across Switzerland, moving mostly at night to avoid being recognized, sleeping in the forest or in abandoned huts, scavenging as he moves along. And what of his wife and the two children he has left behind? The book alternates between Thomas, the husband and his wanderings and Astrid, the wife, and how she copes with his disappearance. Walking away from one’s obligations is interesting, but at the same time to abandon one’s family seems unnecessarily cruel so I found it difficult to be too sympathetic towards Thomas. At the same time, I found Astrid’s reluctance to accept his absence, her flimsy excuses to both herself and to others hard to understand. I wanted more, I wanted to understand the character’s motivations but the author kept us at a distance. His measured, cool prose gave us plenty of detail but nothing that truly satisfied my curiosity.
I suspect the author deliberately left his character’s motivations unfocused allowing the readers to ponder upon a variety of questions, is our current life the one we want, are our routines meant to bring comfort or to chain us down, can one ever really know another person? To the Back of Beyond is a perplexing, strange yet fascinating story that I enjoyed but I suspect there could be many readers who would simply want to toss this book against a wall.