The Bitterest Age - Hardcover

Kennedy, Raymond

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0395686296 ISBN 13: 9780395686294

Publisher: Ticknor & Fields, 1994

Synopsis

The Bitterest Age is a beautiful novel about the power of love, faith, and faithfulness, set against the tumultuous background of the last year of World War Two. It is the story of a German family caught between the bombs of the Allies, now reducing Berlin to rubble, and the oncoming terror of the Soviet army. And it is the unforgettable portrait of a remarkable girl and her resolute devotion to her missing father.
Ursula Maas has moved her family from Berlin to the outlying city of Potsdam, where she and her two children, Ingeborg and Andreas, hope to survive the last disastrous months of the Thousand Year Reich. It has been over a year since they have heard from the father, fighting on the Eastern Front, and the adults have given up hope of his return; but Ingeborg refuses to admit he is dead. When, with the imminent arrival of the Soviet army, Ursula insists they must flee, Ingeborg, fearful that in the ensuing chaos she will lose all chance of finding her father again, steadfastly refuses to leave.
The Bitterest Age is a novel about the moral sanity of the everyday, set against the apocalyptic insanity of history. Narrated with precise historical accuracy and authenticity, the book is a gripping portrayal of a German family in the last, stunning months of the war. And in Ingeborg Maas it offers a poignant, universal story of a young girl's unshakable love. The Bitterest Age confirms Raymond Carver's observation that "Kennedy is a master storyteller... The author's vision has to do with a real wisdom of the heart."

About this title

About the Author:

Raymond Kennedy teaches writing at Columbia University.

From Kirkus Reviews:

In his seventh novel, Kennedy (Columbine, 1980) tackles the highly charged subject of the lives of German citizenry near the end of World War II. Ten-year-old Ingeborg has moved with her mother and younger brother from Berlin to Potsdam in an effort to escape the bombings. Her father is a German soldier currently listed as missing in action. But Ingeborg assumes, with simple bright-child logic: ``If the letters that had been sent to her father had not reached where he was, that did not mean that he was not where he was. It meant only that the letters had not got to where he was.'' The more conditions around them deteriorate, the more tightly she clings to the prospect of her father's return. In lieu of her father, the flirtatious and sycophantic child takes various mentors, all comically unable to fulfill her needs. It's indeed a difficult task, made more so because Kennedy never seems to get Ingeborg's age right: she's precocious on one page, infantile on the next. More interesting than his characters are Kennedy's lush descriptions: scenes in cellars during air raids, accounts of searching for food, frantic illegal flight, and destroying any signs of Nazi loyalty just before the Russians arrive. Particularly memorable is a passage in which Ingeborg shoves a letter to her father, returned in the last regular mail delivery, into the church offertory box. Unfortunately, these evocative passages are ruined by Kennedy's past-tense rhetorical style, i.e., his insistence on pointing out what he's just described. The emotional content is thus watered down in a plot that can best be understood emotionally. Splendid secondhand descriptions are not enough to carry the thin storyline and simplistic ending. -- Copyright ©1994, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

About this edition

• Publisher: Ticknor & Fields
• Publication date: 1994
• ISBN 10: 0395686296
• ISBN 13: 9780395686294
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 218