"A Whole Life" by Robert Seethaler ****

• Austrian author
• Originally published in 2015
• Setting:  Austrian village just pre WWII until 1970s
• Characters:
• Andreas Egger (fictional), mountain man, abused by uncle, crooked leg
• Marie:  Egger's wife
• Horned Hannes:  mountain encountered at beginning, alive, and at the end, not
• Quotes:
• p.2..."...it  had turned icy-cold again, and the snow fell so thickly and incessantly from the sky that it seemed softly to swallow the landscape, smothering all life and sound."...nice alliteration
• p.22..."He though slowly, spoke slowly and walked slowly; yet every thought, every word and every step left a mark precisely where, in his opinion, such marks were supposed to be."
• p.25..."Then he would think about his future, which extended infinitely before him, precisely because he expected nothing of it."
• p.27..."....Egger carried inextinguishably within him:  a pain that, after the brief touch of a fold of fabric, had sunk into the flesh of his upper arm his shoulder, his breast finally settling somewhere in the region of his heart."...falling in love with his future wife
• p.30..."Scars are like years, he said:  one follows another and it's all of them together that make a person who they are."
• p.31..."His kind of man needed to lift up his eyes and look as far as possible beyond his own small, limited patch of ground."
• p.44..."You can buy a man's hours off him, you can steal his days from him, or you can rob him of his whole life, but no one can take away from any man so much as a single moment.".....hmmm..Egger's employer
• p.85..."If you're on the way to Hell, he'd say, you have to laugh with the devils:  ;it costs nothing and makes the whole thing more bearable.
• p.130..."Egger was profoundly shocked by this unexpected encounter.  Almost a whole life lay between Horned Hannes' disappearance and his turning up again."
• Review:  A quiet gem of a read.  When it comes right down to it, what constitutes 'a whole life"  Is it our memories, although they change with time?  Is it who we have known?  Is it the challenges we have faced and the manner in which we have done so?  In the end, it seems to me that it is an ephemeral notion, and Robert Seethaler quietly, eloquently, and simply portrays that.  He somehow captures the unimportance, yet undeniablility, of the passage of time.  He takes the reader into the mind of a man who is deceptively simple, because he is quiet, yet his internal world is vibrant, sensitive, and profound.  Lovely story of one man's whole life, which no one can really tell at all.