Reviews for To die in spring : a novel

Book list
From Booklist, Copyright © American Library Association. Used with permission.

*Starred Review* Pressed into military service in the final days of WWII, a young German farmhand finds himself in a nightmare world of cruelty and desperation. Assigned to supply duty in occupied Hungary, Walter is spared combat but subjected to other horrors: gangrenous hospitals, treacherous journeys through the forest, and Russian planes strafing overhead. Senior officers are harsh and capricious, drinking themselves numb. Everyone suspects everyone else of being a deserter, especially those in uniform heading away from the front. It will all be over soon, people keep saying. But not soon enough to spare Walter's father, sent to a prison regiment for giving ruined cigarettes to a POW, or Walter's irreverent best friend, Fiete, caught deserting and facing an ambivalent firing squad. Rothmann's (Young Light, 2010) prose lingers plaintively on images of suffering animals and devastated buildings but avoids sentimentality about all that is damaged. And in portraying Walter with compassion, both as a vulnerable teenager and, later, as an old man who suffers in silence, Rothmann bravely insists that readers consider questions of culpability, of how ordinary Germans could be both perpetrators and victims. The result is a quietly unsettling triumph for Rothmann, who is well-known for his novels of working-class life.--Driscoll, Brendan Copyright 2017 Booklist


Kirkus
Copyright © Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

A reluctant German soldier wades through the final days of the second world war.Walter Urban is a teenager in 1945, an apprentice on a dairy farm, when he is forced to volunteer for the SS. The war is in its final stages and Germany has begun to run out of soldiers: now, the very young and the very old must fight. Rothmann's (Fire Doesn't Burn, 2012, etc.) haunting new novel describes Walter's experiences during these final months of the war. Assigned to a supply unit, he manages to avoid the front line, serving instead as a driver. The horrors of the war seem to flicker at the corners of his vision. In a field he notices a dozen starving rabbits, "so thin that their ribs showed, and their eyelids were swollen nearly shut," while a buzzard circles above them. He drives past the bodies of German deserters, strung from the trees like ornaments. This last sight turns out to be a bad omen: Walter's best friend, Fiete, a smart, caustic boy, critical of the war ("Any idiot can destroy and kill," he says), eventually tries to run away. Rothmann's writing is spare and vivid, nearly cinematic. It is also crucial: German accounts of WWII have been relatively rare and slow in coming, especially when it comes to descriptions of their country's own suffering. Rothmann is unflinching in his accounts of both German atrocities and misery. All of this by itself would have made for a spectacular novel, but there is yet another layer to the narrative: it begins and ends a generation later, as Walter is dying. His grown son has given Walternow a silent, heavy-drinking mana notebook in which to write his memories. But Walter has left the notebook nearly blank, leaving his son alone to fill in the gaps. Searing, haunting, incandescent: Rothmann's new novel is a vital addition to the trove of wartime fiction. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.


Publishers Weekly
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This brilliant novel from German author Rothmann (Knife Edge) follows Walter Urban and his close friend Friedrich, two adolescent dairy farm workers in northern Germany, during the waning months of World War II. While out drinking at a local beer hall, they were coerced into enlisting in the German army by SS officers. The unnamed narrator, Walter's son, pieces together his father's wartime experience in the present day, after Walter's death, by constructing the few factual details available to him into a vivid narrative that reveals the horrors of war and a traumatic event that changed Walter's life. Spare and elegant, the novel paints a quietly harrowing picture of the lasting effects of human violence and offers brief, poignant glimpses into the natural world (especially when members of the animal kingdom wander unknowingly into the war zone). Directly confronting issues of responsibility, accountability, and legacy, this is an undeniably powerful work. (Aug.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.

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