Parting is a lighthearted yet melancholic love story of the last precious hours before exile, fascism and war.
The young legal trainee Raimund travels from Berlin to Paris to visit his girlfriend, the lively and free-spirited Teddy. It is the interwar period, a time when life still sparkles.
Together with Teddy’s colorful entourage – the charming bon vivant Franz, the serious Mademoiselle Gault, the eccentric Mr. Andrews, and a motley crew of artists and lost souls – they roam through Parisian cafés and restaurants, celebrating their freedom, aware that nothing will stay as it is.
In this way a day and night full of lightness and longing unfold, with the inevitable farewell ever-present in their minds.
W&N Essential, translated by Michael Hofmann
The young legal trainee Raimund travels from Berlin to Paris to visit his girlfriend, the lively and free-spirited Teddy. It is the interwar period, a time when life still sparkles.
Together with Teddy’s colorful entourage – the charming bon vivant Franz, the serious Mademoiselle Gault, the eccentric Mr. Andrews, and a motley crew of artists and lost souls – they roam through Parisian cafés and restaurants, celebrating their freedom, aware that nothing will stay as it is.
In this way a day and night full of lightness and longing unfold, with the inevitable farewell ever-present in their minds.
W&N Essential, translated by Michael Hofmann
Reviews
It is about the last moments of happiness before catastrophe
Parting is . . . one of the classic novels of this German period of upheaval - between the exuberantly morbid mood of optimism at the end of the 1920s and the dark shadow that the Nazi regime cast on the mind and mind before it even began . . . the novel brilliantly knows how to reflect the mood of the time
His novel . . . is dabbed with impressionistic lightness
Parting describes the melancholic search for happiness and freedom in Paris in the 1930s . . . Fast-paced and breathless on the one hand, but then also incredibly casual, playful and fragrant in spring, this novel tells of the freedom to seek happiness in melancholy; he is also a fabulous travel guide through the Latin Quarter of the early 1930s
The beautiful and the terrible, the light and the heavy, are condensed here in a narrative that can develop a physical power even in the most mundane: "I felt her voice again on my eardrum." Readers feel the same way
A shockingly clear-sighted novel about a century-long love is now being published: Parting
What a book! Lightning-fast in his use of language, sometimes breathtaking, wonderfully carefree, and written with the uninhibited dedication that only a young and still virtually unknown author has. Heartbreaking
Buoyant, but also elegiac . . . it is . . . exclusively, a very personal romance novel
Despite the novel's pervading sense of doom, the autobiographical love story retained a sense of hope
They are free, young, carefree, melancholic and in love . . . Parting tells what is lost when we fall . . . The characters in Parting are prodigal sons and daughters by profession, they are expected at home by parents so that they can take exams and turn into trains. They savour freedom as long as they have it. Because we readers know how dark the future will be, Parting tells of the reason of irrationality
So heartbreaking and yet so cold-bloodedly written . . . a novel that is as graceful as it is magnificent
A romance novel; a book of youthful exuberance of emotions, in which the premonition of what is to come resonates [with readers]
The story of a love that fades. And a snapshot of the generation between the two world wars, which is on its way to ruin with it eyes open
A sensational novel . . . As light and fleeting as happiness itself . . . It still reads almost as if we readers today could simply join this easy-going group in Paris that is being described, drink Chinese tea with them, smoke Gitanes and forget the time together
