From Library Journal
A sound engineer obsessed with voice (and in fact all sonar phenomena) and the eight-year-old daughter of propaganda minister Goebbels are the main protagonists in this rather grim World War II novel. Herr Karnau, a "smooth, blank wax disc when others have long since been engraved with countless grooves," records all vocal ranges, from rally whoops to death rattles (while studying the tongues and aural passages of severed animal heads). He meets little Helga when surprisingly asked to mind the Goebbels children for a few days. They are also together in Hitler's bunker for the last days of the Reich, as Karnau adds der Fuhrer's stressed voice to his archives. Karnau survives, later to comment on the archives in 1992 as a "retired security man"?though officials wonder if he mightn't have been more. Helga, as one might guess, is not so lucky. Winner of Germany's Willner Prize, this is recommended?but not for the faint of heart?to larger fiction collections.?Robert E. Brown, Onondaga Cty. P.L., Syracuse, N.Y.
Copyright 1997 Reed Business Information, Inc. --Ce texte fait référence à une édition épuisée ou non disponible de ce titre.
Copyright 1997 Reed Business Information, Inc. --Ce texte fait référence à une édition épuisée ou non disponible de ce titre.
The New York Times Book Review, Michael Upchurch
If the novel has a weakness, it is in Karnau's deliberate incompleteness. With no family, friends or lover, he can seem untenable as a character; a trick of brazen artifice and, like his recordings, perhaps a little too custom-designed to serve the novel convincingly. Yet the permutations and ghoulish nuances of his sound explorations offer such disquieting food for thought that any doubts about Beyer's skills in depicting this strange character surface only after one closes the book. Up until then, it's the risks Beyer takes that impress the most....
--Ce texte fait référence à une édition épuisée ou non disponible de ce titre.
