I was on my way to look for a life of my own.
A brilliant, brutally honest autobiographical novel, long out of
print, from one of the great artistic polymaths of the 20th century.
This is a Sebaldian account of the narrator's attempt to break free of a
repressive upper-middle-class upbringing and make his way as an artist
and individual, written in a single incantatory paragraph.
*
Leavetaking* is the story of an upper-middle-class childhood and
adolescence in Berlin between the wars. In the course of the book, Weiss
plumbs the depths of family life: there is the early death of his
beloved sister Margit, the difficult relationship with his parents, the
fantasies of adolescence and youth, all set in the midst of an
increasing anti-Semitism, which forces the Weiss family to move again
and again, a peripatetic existence that only intensifies the narrator's
growing restlessness.
The young narrator is largely oblivious to world events and focused
instead on becoming an artist, an ambition frustrated generally by his
milieu and specifically by his mother, who, herself a former actress,
destroys his paintings during one of the family's moves. In the end, he
turns to an older mentor, Harry Haller, a fictionalized portrait of
Hermann Hesse, who encouraged and supported Weiss, and with Haller's
example before him, the narrator takes his first steps towards a truly
independent life. Intensely lyrical, written with great imaginative
power, Leavetaking is a vivid evocation of a world that has
disappeared and of the narrator's developing consciousness.
THE NEVERSINK LIBRARY champions books from around the world that
have been overlooked, underappreciated, looked askance at, or foolishly
ignored. They are issued in handsome, well-designed editions at
reasonable prices in hopes of their passing from one reader to
another--and further enriching our culture.
