About this item
Highlights
- The Second World War is over, but young Tomas learns that Europe's wounds have not yet healed.Discover the 30th anniversary edition of a Whitbread shortlisted novel - available in the U.S. for the first time.
- Author(s): Martin Goodman
- 233 Pages
- Fiction + Literature Genres, Coming of Age
Description
Book Synopsis
The Second World War is over, but young Tomas learns that Europe's wounds have not yet healed.
Discover the 30th anniversary edition of a Whitbread shortlisted novel - available in the U.S. for the first time.
"You come to see [Tomas] is conserving himself deliberately against the old suffering, the tired old guilt of the adults... Simplicity is a great virtue, in novels as elsewhere. After all, it can only be produced from sincerity." - Penelope Fitzgerald
It's 1966. Young Tomas is taught by English war veterans, the adults around him haunted by memories of war. He walks the ruins of Coventry with his Gran, the city still rebuilding from the blitz. But his mother is German, and Tomas is torn between two worldviews.
As he nears adulthood Tomas heads to 1970s Berlin. He's taken in by his enigmatic uncle, a blind, disgraced Nazi soldier. Arm in arm, they explore a drastically changing Berlin. Out in Dresden, a city decimated by Allied firebombs, Tomas finds more family with their hidden stories. This soaring, poignant novel invites readers to explore what we inherit from the wars of our elders, and how we might move on.
Review Quotes
"Goodman interweaves a young man's search for selfhood in provincial Britain with the mysteries of his mother's German past." - Vogue, UK
"This excellent first novel's central character is so completely realised he could have walked out of one of those enigmatic Bruce Chatwin pieces about old mysterious European types."- Time Out, London
"Heralds a new dawn for British writing."- The Daily Post
"ON BENDED KNEES is a professional combination of rite-of-passage novel and cultural quest. The troubled half-German adolescent hero, Tomas, goes to stay with relatives in Berlin, following the disturbing death of his father. That city is brilliantly seen through the hero's eyes, as is the character who effectively steals the novel, the blind and autocratic Herr Poppel. The novel comes most to life when Tomas and Poppel are taking their walks around the divided city's streets and parks, the older man dispensing the secrets of longevity, the younger man hesitantly challenging him on the implications of his cast-iron pronouncements and their relation to Germany's guilty past. A very impressive debut."- The Scotsman
"ON BENDED KNEES is puzzling at first, because Tomas, who wants to tell his own story with proper attention - 'on bended knees' - seems to have very little personality, or even particular preference. But you come to see that he is conserving himself deliberately against the old suffering, the tired old guilt of the adults. He is biding his time. DJ Taylor has called ON BENDED KNEES "deceptively simple", but I can't see what's deceptive about it. Simplicity is a great virtue, in novels as elsewhere. After all, it can only be produced from sincerity."- Penelope Fitzgerald, The Evening Standard
"The novel's blunt, no-frills economy is part of its charm. Goodman writes with flare and panache, and the narrative fizzes along. Goodman's novel soars."- The Times