About the Author

Christopher Ransmayr was born in Austria in 1954, and has written two novels, including the highly acclaimed The Last World. He lives in Dublin.

Reviews

American audiences may react to this highly stylized German novel the way they often react to a foreign film: impressed but puzzled. At times fierce and hallucinatory, at other times ponderous and cold, this look at post-WWII Germany presents a world where peacetime brings no relief from suffering and struggle, nor from the hovering, obliquely addressed shadow of the Holocaust. In the small town of Moor, which had harbored a concentration camp, Bering, the son of a blacksmith, has inherited his father's ability with machines, a skill much in demand due to the wreckage caused by Allied bombings and victorious marching armies. But after his mother succumbs to religious superstition, Bering leaves his family to live with the mysterious Ambras, aka the Dog King, who resides in an abandoned villa with a battalion of half-crazed hounds. Along with Lily, a young woman adept at weaponry and black marketeering, Bering and Ambras attempt to carve a life for themselves and, eventually, to leave Germany altogether. Bering suffers from an eye disease that causes his vision to darken gradually. Ransmayr's treatment of this element is emblematic of the book as a whole: it clearly bears allegorical intent, but the meaning remains murky. How complicit were the villagers in the killings that took place at the camp? Ably translated by Woods, this novel paints a convincing postapocalyptic world sent back into a nearly pre-civilized state. But Ransmayr (The Terrors of Ice and Darkness), though clearly probing the question of how Germany is to view itself in the wake of the Holocaust and WWII, never pulls his story out of his dark, expressionist atmospherics into the clear light of an answer. (Apr.)

Apocalyptic and parabolic, by turns Kafkaesque and Orwellian, this first novel is set in a post-World War II concentration camp town called Moor in a Germany rendered preindustrial as punishment‘a Germany where cars are scrapped, railroads are abandoned, and food is unavailable; where gangs roam and plunder; and where the populace is at the mercy of the Liberator. Former camp inmate Ambras, the title character‘so-called because of his subjugation of a pack of wild dogs‘lives in an abandoned villa and is feared and hated by the townfolk. He is soon joined by the central character, the blacksmith Bering, who has transformed Ambras's dying Studebaker into a fantastic power machine (dubbed the Crow), and then by the peripatetic Lily, a trader who knows where arms are stored. Together, they attempt to escape to Brazil. Imaginative, well executed, and carefully observed, this novel by the prize-winning Ransmayr succeeds both as visionary and suspense fiction. Recommended.‘Robert E. Brown, Onondaga Cty. P.L., Syracuse, N.Y.