Gretel and the Great War - by Adam Ehrlich Sachs (Paperback)

About the Book

"A novel in twenty-six alphabetical chapters set in the dark side of early twentieth-century Vienna"--

Book Synopsis

A New Yorker best book of 2024 One of Bloomberg's nine best books of summer 2024

"Inventive . . . Whimsical . . . Fusing period atmosphere with fairy tale, Ehrlich Sachs hints at modern themes while summoning an unexpected imaginary place." --The New Yorker

"Sachs draws from the madcap, darkly comic tradition of postmodern European fiction . . . Like Thomas Bernhard before him, Sachs is a very funny writer unafraid of italics and exclamation marks, which he marshals against the absurdity of the world." --Dustin Illingworth, The New York Times Book Review

"Adam Ehrlich Sachs continues to prove he is one of our most daring and original writers." --Camille Bordas, author of How to Behave in a Crowd

A lean, seductive, and dazzlingly inventive novel that shows us the dark side of early twentieth-century Vienna.

Vienna, 1919. A once-mighty empire has finally come crashing down--and a mysterious young woman, unable to speak, has turned up on the streets. A doctor appeals to the public for information about her past and receives a single response, from a sanatorium patient who claims to be her father. The man reveals only her name: Gretel. But he encloses a bedtime story he asks the doctor to read aloud to her, about an Architect whose radically modern creation has caused a great scandal. The next day a second story arrives, about a Ballet Master who develops a new position of the feet. Twenty-four more stories follow in alphabetical order, about an Immunologist and a Jeweler, a Revolutionary and a Satirist, a Waif and an X-ray Technician and a Zionist. Crossing paths and purposes, their stories interweave until a single picture emerges, that of a decadent, death-obsessed, oversexed empire buzzing with the ideas of Freud and Karl Kraus. There are artists who ape the innocence of children, and scientists who insist that children are anything but innocent . . . And then there's Gretel's own mother, who will do whatever it takes to sing onstage at the City Theater. Is it any wonder that this world--soon to vanish anyway in a war to end all wars--was one from which Gretel's father wished to shelter her?

Review Quotes

"No staid work of history, this. Sachs draws from the madcap, darkly comic tradition of postmodern European fiction to reimagine the continent's catastrophic destiny . . . Like Thomas Bernhard before him, Sachs is a very funny writer unafraid of italics and exclamation marks, which he marshals against the absurdity of the world." --Dustin Illingworth, The New York Times Book Review

"Inventive . . . Whimsical . . . Fusing period atmosphere with fairy tale, Ehrlich Sachs hints at modern themes while summoning an unexpected imaginary place." --The New Yorker

"A work of comic and inventive excess . . . The novel becomes the perfect vessel to carry and satirize the post-rational ideas of a self-obsessed society . . . Sachs's fascination with eccentric artists and thinkers illuminates what he values most in writing: aesthetic courage, individual style. Gretel possesses both . . . Peerless." --Walker Rutter-Bowman, The Nation

"A whirligig of uncanny fables . . . A sumptuous, skittish portrait of a society beset by madness and teetering on the edge of collapse . . . Gretel and the Great War functions like its own deep, dark, enchanted forest." --Lucy Scholes, The Daily Telegraph

"A glorious triumph . . . Surprising, taking twists and turns practiced readers and storytellers won't seem coming . . . Entertaining . . . Vivid . . . Important." --Joshua M. Patton, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

"A sumptuous, skittish portrait of interwar Austria--a world of madness, opulence, precarity, decay and danger . . . A carousel of increasingly uncanny fairy tales that resonate with echoes of Freud's case studies and Bruno Bettelheim's The Uses of Enchantment." --Prospect (ten best books of the year)

"No one writing today has explored the mercurial nature of the father-son relationship with more humor and fresh insight than Adam Ehrlich Sachs . . . With the publication of his third book, Gretel and the Great War, Sachs is broadening his canvas to put this core dynamic in the context of social upheaval, obsession, and, above all, legacy." --Matthew James Seidel, The Millions

"One of my greatest pleasures as a reader [. . .] is discovering a new writer who's bravely doing their own thing, and then awaiting each new book from them. Since I first read Sachs in n+1 almost a decade ago, nothing of his has disappointed . . . Sachs's fiction achieves its own kind of timeliness, reaching for deeper significance through the absurd." --Ben Roth, Agni

"Sachs's Vienna is a vibrant and petty place, full of insecure authorities and overconfident revolutionaries seeking to overturn everything established. . . . Sachs is a clever, self-aware storyteller, and he draws creative tension from his ostensibly childlike narrative form." --Robert Rubsam, The Washington Post

"A fabulously, disturbingly smart work . . . What keeps the reader enthralled in such an unnerving text is Sachs's tone. He has a disarming ability to interrupt a tragic tale with a well-placed wink." --Sunny S. Yudkoff, Los Angeles Review of Books

"In his fiction, Sachs creates delightfully absurd scenarios in which reason is pushed beyond its logical conclusions with characters who waltz and pirouette into the gray area between lucidity and lunacy . . . Gretel and the Great War is a fever-dream of Vienna, the beating heart of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, in the run-up to the First World War, and a distorting lens that might well help sharpen our view of our own delusions." --Tess Lewis, The Berlin Journal

"Gretel reads like the best of Italo Calvino's pseudo-magical literary puzzles replete with the kind of intrigue often attributed to authors like Jesse Ball and László Krasznahorkai. Like those authors, reading Sachs can feel like getting lost in a machination set by a master architect." --Joe Stanek, Chicago Review of Books

"A treasury of connected tales . . . Their mode is metafictional, containing narratives within narratives, like those in the Arabian Nights. Gradually they form a mosaic not only of the chaos of wartime Austria-Hungary but of the fate of Gretel's broken family." --Sam Sacks, The Wall Street Journal

"Sachs knocks it out of the ballpark in this novel organized like a set of nested Russian dolls . . . Fiction lovers may experience moments of vertigo reading this metafiction, but it's so engaging they'll love it anyway." --Library Journal (starred review)

"Intricate, unexpected, and delightful . . . An ingeniously woven novel . . . Playful, charming, and brilliant--a profundity made of toylike whimsies." --Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

"Every surprising new turn arrives with an incandescent and terrifying sense of inevitability . . . A large readership of this crazy book would make the world a safer and saner place." --Arthur Willemse, World Literature Today

"Sachs lends a touch of the fantastical to Viennese life at the end of WWI in this inventive novel . . . [He] keenly captures the pulse of a city on the cusp of immense change. This spirited volume lingers long after the final page." --Publishers Weekly

"Adam Ehrlich Sachs makes books that make their own traditions. This is the highest praise I know, for serious." --Joshua Cohen, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Netanyahus

"Relentless, in the best way possible. Think Mary Poppins's satchel, think one deranged matrioshka constantly coming out from under another--Gretel and the Great War is the gift that keeps on giving. Adam Ehrlich Sachs continues to prove he is one of our most daring and original writers." --Camille Bordas, author of How to Behave in a Crowd

"Countless writers take pleasure in the style of their own sentences. Few of them provide such pleasure to their readers. Sachs provides it again and again. He doesn't let up. Plus he's funny as hell. No writer alive is more startlingly alive." --Adam Levin, author of Mount Chicago

"His lunatics clamor to be believed, but Sachs wants something else: pin-thin-fancies that braid a rope to make your legs dance." --Jesse Ball

About the Author

Adam Ehrlich Sachs is the author of three books: Gretel and the Great War, The Organs of Sense, and Inherited Disorders. His fiction has appeared in The New Yorker, n+1, and Harper's Magazine, and he was a finalist for the Believer Book Award and the Sami Rohr Prize for Jewish Literature. He has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the American Academy in Berlin, and he lives in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.