A Whole L..ot of Death
Edited by: Aahana Banerjee
Andreas Egger’s life begins at the deathbed of Horned Hannes. Hannes is reflective and resigned, deep and disturbed, everything you would expect a dying man to be. Egger’s reflection, however, begins when Hannes takes off running into the blizzard and is seemingly swallowed whole by the Cold Lady, Death.
A Whole Life by Robert Seethaler, originally written in German and translated into English by Charlotte Collins, is in many ways, a memory book about a life spent coping with death. The passivity invested in the narrative by Seethaler allows Egger to reconcile with the lack of control he has over his own life; he becomes “a small but not unimportant cog in a gigantic machine called Progress”. Things topple and tumble and swirl into snowstorms all around Egger who has no choice but to make sense of it all in his characteristic quietude.
That Egger doesn’t speak much accounts for the dearth of dialogue and a want of companionship in the novel, so much so that Egger is left there, abound in his loneliness, begging the stones to speak to him—unfortunately, not in a Goethean way; “He gathered the stones, and because he got bored doing it he gave them names. And when he ran out of names, he gave them words.”
Egger’s quietude is the double-edged sword, the peak and valley, as it were, of the Austrian Alps that the novel is set in. While his reserved disposition in dealing with the death of his mother, his aunt, Horned Hannes, and his wife, lends grace to his process of grief and acceptance, it is almost uncathartic to not see Egger’s garb of grace slip even for the tiniest ephemeral moment. The novel defers and defers the fall and all you want is to take a quick voyeuristic peek at a moment of letting go.
It is not as hopelessly acquiescent though. We see Egger steal a brief moment of happiness when he starts taking tourists hiking up the trails he knows like the back of his hand. But it is not enough. Egger’s life is patched together with the lives, and more overtly, with the deaths of others. He is pieced together with their scars; “Scars are like years, he said: one follows another and it’s all of them together that make a person who they are.” So, it is no wonder then that we want a moment of release for our protagonist, who is, by his own confession, a tapestry of scars.
On the whole, however, at the end of Egger’s life, when the Cold Lady comes for him, the reader is imbued with some of Egger’s noble acceptance. You can do nothing but admire the enduring scars as winter settles over the valley one last time.