Review: The Luck of the Weissensteiners
The Luck of the Weissensteiners by Christoph Fischer
My rating: 5 of 5 stars
Milan Kundera opened his novel `The Unbearable Lightness of Being’ describing the street where he grew up and how the name kept changing depending on the political heterodoxy of the time. In `The Luck of The Weissensteiners,’ also set in Czechoslovakia, in Bratislava, we are introduced immediately to Greta Weissensteiner and learn that she is likewise subjected to sweeping changes beyond her control. A bibliophile who speaks several languages and reads her favorite German and Russian authors in the original versions, she is bubbly, pretty, anxious for life.
The introduction of Germany and Russia puts us in the time frame of those tense years before the outbreak of World War Two, two decades before the setting of Kundera’s novel, but dealing similarly in the themes of identity, nationality, shifting ideas and shifting frontiers.
Greta, her head filled with stories of passion and loss, falls for Wilhelm Winkelmeier, a bookseller from Berlin, and he is immediately besotted. He is a German Catholic. She is Jewish – the seeds sewn for a great and troubled romance that takes us into and through the war, `The Luck of the Weissensteiners’ being the first book in Christoph Fischer’s epic trilogy of two families who suffer and survive.
I called up Kundera’s name because Fischer has the same oblique style and concentrates on the slow steady construction of his characters until they are flesh and blood people that we know as intimately as our neighbors and friends. His story portrays struggle, romance, separation and, ultimately, redemption in a way that is both moving and totally believable. The moment I finished this book I clicked into Amazon to find the second book in the trilogy. That says all that needs to be said.
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