August 1, 2020
The delicate work of the negotiating table frames a quietly intense novel of sudden grief and its aftermath. Novelist and journalist Finch brings eloquent control to the story of Edvard Behrends, who leads a team of diplomats trying to resolve a wrenching conflict in an unnamed country via talks at a serene Austrian ski resort and who recalls the beauties of his surroundings and the Sisyphean nature of his task in a narrative addressed to his absent partner, Anna. Though Finch's experience as an activist for refugee rights lends the negotiation convincing realism, the real peace talks here are internal--and one-sided, for Anna, we soon learn, is dead, and the brilliance that has put Behrends at the pinnacle of his profession is nearly overmatched by the forces unleashed by a titanic loss. As work in the conference rooms threatens to founder, Behrends dances ever closer to a confrontation with the devastating certainty of death, quoting Larkin: "Most things may never happen: this one will." A man who enjoys the finer things, including fine things that come in a bottle, Behrends wears his literary influences, from Rebecca West to Thomas Mann, proudly. While this dialogue with books makes for intellectually bracing passages, the novel at moments feels like an essay on love and mortality in the guise of a tale that knows its way around a good Riesling. But as the full story of Anna's death is unspooled, chilliness gives way to the potent voice of a man whose vital self is being hollowed out by drink and grief. Behrends leaps back into focus even as his world threatens to recede into an alcoholic blur. A lucid work carefully balanced between the terrors and consolations that fiction can provide.
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