Praise & Reviews
Hugo - Kirkus Reviews
A return trip to postwar Germany results in love and disaster in Linden’s novel. In the spring of 1958, Hugo Kaltenbrunner is accosted by Life magazine reporter Tova Shulman. She’s investigating the German’s prior association with a deceased man named Gustav Meier, and she displays a knowledge of the “disposition of Siberhaus,” which unsettles him deeply. After the war, Kaltenbrunner had moved to New York City, where he obtained a job writing a regular column for the Times under the name Harry Willis. He learns from his boss that Tova belongs to a delegation that includes famed Nazi hunter Saul Wiesenthal. Not long afterward, Hugo takes a sabbatical and leaves the U.S. aboard an ocean liner bound for Amsterdam; he plans to make his way into East Germany, now controlled by the Soviets. Aboard the SS Atlantic, he meets Helmut von Hoff, a fellow German who’s inherited a coal-mining fortune, and his adopted adult daughter Anna, with whom Hugo is instantly smitten. Sensing Hugo’s interest, Helmut warns him, “You mustn’t think too much about Anna. She is not for you, nor for anyone else for that matter.” Hugo surmises that there’s a secret about Anna that Helmut is keen to keep hidden; undeterred, he plots various ways of separating her from her father. After arriving in Germany, Hugo is given $10,000 to write a book about Helmut and his “illustrious family,” but he finds his homeland more foreign than he remembers, and he lands in a number of scrapes that start to make him fear that he’ll never see Anna again.
Linden’s book rings with echoes of midcentury noir, to which he adds a wry postmodern sense of whimsy. In an extended passage early on, Hugo meets an elderly woman and begins to fancy her; his recurring daydreams of kissing “her wrinkled mouth” are brilliantly effective, both in what they suggest about his character and in their unconventional but welcome insistence on the continuing erotic allure of the aged. The decision to let Hugo narrate is inspired, for the chief delight of the book is his skewed, slightly pompous, and reliably eccentric perspective; Helmut, he says, is “like a stone wall, cut from a mountainside and fitted together with such art and precision that no mortar or grout had been required.” Linden’s dialogue is likewise offbeat and frequently zigs in surprising directions: “Africa is full of death,” notes Anna, in the midst of a conversation about her stepmother. “Without the hyenas, the dead would soon cover the land.” As Hugo journeys deeper into the dark heart of postwar Europe, disturbing revelations about his associates pile up, and he comes to resemble Holly Martins in The Third Man (1949)—a naif at the mercy of inscrutable forces whose gaze into the abyss leaves him permanently changed. “I saw good and evil, plain as day,” he reflects near the end, “and between them a domain of moral ambiguity wherein the majority of humanity endured. I saw the world as it was, and not as it ought to be.”
A strange, literate, and often darkly funny book with the air of a classic noir