Irretrievable

Opposites attract, and Helmut Holk and Christine Arne, the attractive married couple at the center of this engrossing novel by one of Germany’s greatest novelists, could not be more unalike. Christine is a serious soul from a devoutly religious background. She is brooding and beautiful and devoted to her husband and their two children. Helmut is lighthearted and pleasure-loving and largely content to defer to his wife’s deeper feelings and better wisdom. They live in a beautiful large house overlooking the sea, which they built themselves, and have been happily married for twenty-three years-only of late a certain tension has crept into their dealings with each other. Little jokes, casual endearments, long-meditated plans: they all hit a raw nerve. How a couple can slowly drift apart until one day they find themselves in a situation that is beyond recall, from which they cannot go back, is at the heart of this timeless story of everyday life. Theodor Fontane’s great gift is to tell the story effectively in his characters’ own words, listening to how they talk and fail to talk to each other, watching them turn away from their own true feelings as much as from each other. Irretrievable is a nuanced, urbane, affectionate, and profoundly humane reckoning with the blindness of love.