What are the meaningful moments in someone’s life? Novelists tend to answer this question very differently from biographers. The latter tend to concentrate on outward events – real-world changes and achievements. Novelists likewise give us the grand sweep, the conflicts, struggles, decisions and resolutions. Yet using creative wordsmithing and imagination, novelists can also home in on the inner person, getting the reader to feel what life is like from a character’s point of view. And when that portrait is unexpectedly rich, empathetic and startling, we might have a fictional story that moves us, about a life that would never spark a parallel biography.
In 160 pages, Austrian author Robert Seethaler takes us into the unspectacular yet compelling life of a stoic, taciturn mountain villager, from his birth in 1902 to his death in the 1980s. “As a child Andreas Egger had never shouted or cheered. He didn’t even really talk until his first year at school,” Seethaler tells us. Introverted Egger grew up as an orphan in the harsh home of relatives, lame but physically strong and resilient. He found work as a laborer for a company that built cable-car systems in the mountains. He wooed an equally quiet young woman, married her and lost her when an avalanche killed her.