A Whole Life, Book Notes

A Whole Life

by Robert Seethaler

A Whole Life, is a very short book. It is very simple, in many respects.  Characters are introduced abruptly, and then they are gone. The main character seems simple in many ways as well. I think though, that it is nearly poetic in its simplicity. It is like the distillations of a life, and the telling is restrained, not simplistic. Seethaler commented in an interview that how he decided what to include and what to leave out was like carving out something:

“It has nothing to do with squeezing, more with carving out. Where do you begin? What do you select? What do you leave out? In the end it all revolves around the question: What are the things that go to make up such a life? It’s like carving wood or sculpting stone. You don’t get many chances. Every cut, every blow of the chisel has to sit right. In a way I was carving Andreas Egger, the book’s central character, out of my heart. Every life, when you look back on it, reduces itself to a few moments. The moments are what stay with us.” (from his interview in the NYTimes)

In the same way that poems really function as leads, indicators, or opposing images to get at the indefinable space between things, in which meaning weighs heavily, I think this book's discrete prose was able to accomplish this.

From the very first bizarre and hilariously weird scene of Horned Hannes leaping away from Death, the White Lady, up the mountainside into the fog and snow the author indicated that this story is very like a fable. Throughout the story, a story that encompasses a whole life between a death and the resurrection, of sorts, of the goatherd, there are brief little indicators, usually whispers, and sometimes sightings of the White Lady, death. The story includes testing, journeys, brief glimpses of connection.

I began also to think of this man, Andreas Egger, and reflect, if I had this man as a grandfather, or great-grandfather, this is exactly how his story would have been told to me. The biggest moments of experience or change (external, world progress/tumult, or internal confidence, contentment, love, glimpse of what love promises, comradery, suffering) would have been strung together to describe this man. I think what was disconcerting was to be a witness to this same story as a constant, not as ups and downs exactly, not intense punctuations that drove the man's identity, but as parts of a whole. He would have been admired for the changes he witnessed, and the ordeals he survived. As the story stands, the reader as mute witness wonders at Egger's capacity for survival, his lack of resentment, his contentment with very little.

The story itself brought up the fact that people did wonder at him, think him strange, become exasperated with him because of his self-contained and relatively simple lifestyle. I do think, though, that we are supposed to see the glimpses of his heart through actions like: his wanting to do something nearly miraculous to express his love for Marie, inarticulate as he is; he writes to Marie after being in the gulag so many years, an action that is difficult for him, but his doing it shows the depth of his loneliness and suffering; his never returning to his property to salvage it after the avalanche, his heartache; his laying on the stone with the cold at his back and the warmth of the sun on his face, his recognition of the sublime surroundings; his asking for work, a raise, different work once damaged, his confidence in his strength; his refusal to kill his uncle, some sort of recognition of brokenness.

“Scars are like years, he said: one follows another and it's all of them together that make a person who they are.” We are all wounded, damaged, and scarred by sin and by the brokenness of the world. What is powerfully whole is recognizing the sheer fact of existence as gift, survival as gift, and the brief glimpses of the fullness that is potential around us in nature and relationships. “In his life he too, like all people, had harboured ideas and dreams. Some he had fulfilled for himself; some had been granted to him. Many things had remained out of reach, or barely had he reached them than they were torn from his hands again. But he was still here. And in the mornings after the first snowmelt, when he walked across the dew-soaked meadow outside his hut and lay down on one of the flat rocks scattered there, the cool stone at his back and the first warm rays of sun on his face, he felt that many things had not gone so badly after all.” 

All of these things resonated deeply with me, and my nordic family experience. It is not fair to say someone is simple or deficient just because they are not wildly expressive.

I think too it's an interesting discussion to have between isolation and solitude. There are moments when Egger feels isolation. He feels it when he is on the front line on the Eastern front, for weeks camping by himself. He feels isolation when he is in the gulag for so long, when he is in the crate, when confronting the television for the first time, and when he takes his bus trip. But even though the book is told from a very interior position, I don't think we are to think that he was isolated--only content with the solitude of single identity. Even though it seems like he is alone, or the lone survivor, he is almost always surrounded by people (working odd jobs for everyone in town, working with the tree service, the cable car, the army, the gulag in cramped quarters, leading excursion trips, etc.). So the solitude of the story comes more from the self-consciousness of an individual, throughout his life, of the limitations of being known or knowing others, but a contentment in that too.

“As it is for all of us, Egger’s existence is given shape by the mundane events and relationships on the personal scale (family, love, work, loss) as they intersect with the larger incidents of wide-ranging impact (war, natural calamity, technological change)... Seethaler...uses a seemingly unremarkable character as a way of explaining what it is like to be in the world, and beautifully articulates the profound pleasure and special privilege of being alive. A quiet delight.” (Alison Huber)

Contentment is a word that came up a lot in thinking about this book. And I do think it really was contentment, and not resignation. Egger was an actor, not merely acted upon. He recognized very quickly the limitations that are a normal part of life, and how they occur, and how we continue to survive through and beyond them. There is a certain delight to take in the limits of a life (plant a little row of potatoes, build a gate in hopes that you have company, change careers when you have different desires or limitations, etc.). I was so relieved to read this book. So many novels are about some grand crisis or revelation, this really was about as lifelike as you can get, and not be like Jorge Luis Borges' "On Exactitude of Science" story, a 1:1 scale map. And also be compelling. I loved too that it was not about dissatisfaction.

JI Packer writes in Knowing God: "The world today is full of suffers from the wasting disease which Albert Camus focused as absurdism ('life is a bad joke'), and from the complaint which we may call MArie Antionette's fever, since she found the phrase that describes it ('nothing tastes'). These disorders blight the whole of life: everything becomes at once a problem and a bore, because nothing seems worthwhile. But absurdist tapeworms and Antionette's fever are ills from which, in the nature of the case, Christians are immune, except for occasional spells of derangement when the power of temptation presses their minds out of shape--and these, by God's mercy do not last."

Egger's final bus ride certainly exemplifies this derangement, as does the parallel seeking of the vacation hikers. “People were evidently looking for something in the mountains that they believed they had lost a long time ago. He never worked out what exactly this was, but over the years he became more and more that the tourists were stumbling not so much after him but after some obscure, insatiable longing.” 

Ultimately, I believe Egger's contentment has a lot to do with his lack of ambition, in a worldly sense. “You can buy a man's hours off him, you can steal his days from him, or you can rob him of his whole life, but no one can take away from any man so much as a single moment.” Egger is resistant (he does not feel compelled to be interested in or motivated by all of the things around him--like the TV), but adaptive (he will work at whatever work there is to be done, he changes as his physical needs demand, and feels some satisfaction in being a part of a changing landscape). Egger “saw himself as a small but not unimportant cog in a gigantic machine called Progress.” He is a lot like the thorny weed he describes: “He had already been so long in the world: he had seen it change and seem to spin faster with every passing year, and he felt like a remnant from some long-buried time, a thorny weed still stretching up, for as long as it possibly could, towards the sun.” He was happy with the part he has played: “He couldn't remember where he had come from, and ultimately he didn't know where he would go. But he could look back without regret on the time in between, his life, with a full-throated laugh and utter amazement.”

So the mountain. Is it a character? The setting? Accidental? The mountain is the compression/ed: stone. It is visible through its scars, and is scarred by events--both events that are done to it by man (tree felling, blasting, cable car making) understood by topography, and accidental (avalanches, patterns of light, weather). Rock stratus is visible like events in life, compressed by time. They ask in the book “Or do you think perhaps the mountain has a memory?” The carving away at the mountain does not diminish the essence of the mountain, just as the man whose arm was cut off was not less of a Self. 

Egger's limp is perfectly adapted to the mountain. Our experience corresponds with rocky terrain, not pavement. Seethaler says in his NYT interview, “I invented all the places in the book, and all the place names. In a way, they’re mythical places. This life, or something very like it, could have been lived anywhere at any time. But of course I do have memories, or emotional memories, of my childhood experiences in the mountains. The wonderful silence of the snow; and also the dangers of the mountains themselves — you don’t forget things like that. Nature can often be enjoyed, but sometimes you have to endure it, too. It can fill you with dread. There’s more to it than just its beauty; it’s also inconceivable and frightening."

The lack of detail certainly adds to the starkness of the book. There is very little color in the book. The most jarring color that I noted was the red of the window box geraniums that replaced the swastika flags after the war. Reading the interview with Seethaler makes even more sense of this essential-ness of the vision of the book, also its interiority: “I grew up with a severe visual impairment and went to a school for the blind in Vienna. As a child I always lived in my own little world. That’s probably why I prefer writing. It’s more of an internalization. With acting you have to externalize, or enlarge the internalizations, make them visible. That was never really my strong point.”

Egger's experience is often tenuous. He exists at the mercy of a wicked uncle, without home for portions of time, working for so much of his life on cable cars: bits of existence hanging from a tense wire, connecting society with the mountain. It is sometimes glorious, sometimes dangerous, sometimes drudgery. This is so like GK Chesterton's quotation: "Yes," he said, "I caught him, with an unseen hook and an invisible line which is long enough to let him wander to the ends of the world, and still to bring him back with a twitch upon the thread."

So, summing up with death and resurrection. Death is the White Lady throughout the book. There are constant reminders of death, whispers and visions, and I think specially jarring to contemporary readers, the forceful inevitability of death is recognized. Questions about death are asked in the book: is it nothingness? is it more? does life have meaning without life after death? “It's a messy business, dying,' he said. 'As time goes on there's just less and less of you. It happens quickly for some; for others it can drag on. Starting from birth you keep losing one thing after another: first a finger, than an arm, first a tooth, then a whole set of teeth, first one memory, then all your memory, and so on and so forth, until one day there's nothing left. Then they chuck what's left of you in a hole and shovel it in and that's your lot.” Ostensibly the book is atheistic. Like most art that gets at the truth of experience, the book itself is dissatisfied with this conclusion as exhaustive. This is not nihilism. There are whispers of an answer to yearnings and glimpses of fulfillment experienced in this life. My friend, Trena summed it up well, quoting Oscar Wilde--we are all of us in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars.