September 5, 2011
There’s no doubt that Schulze (One More Story: Thirteen Stories in the Time-Honored Mode) wants to evoke Adam and Eve cast out of paradise with his latest novel. But what is paradise here? East Germany, where Adam, a tailor, sleeps with his clients despite live-in girlfriend Evelyn? If so, paradise is lost when Evelyn discovers Adam’s infidelities and takes off to Hungary with a man from the West. Home-loving Adam packs their pet tortoise into his beloved Wartburg 311 to pursue her and the political overtakes the personal: it’s 1989. The book, ably translated by Woods, is full of homely details of life behind the wall, in Hungary, and in the West, and of people accommodating to what happens when those details change. Accidental émigré Adam is diagnosed with “emigration syndrome” and “adaptation problems,” which his namesake must surely have had as well. Schulze’s Evelyn has a different problem: she’s underwritten and it’s not entirely clear why Adam’s so smitten. (The same can be said, arguably, of her biblical counterpart.) But this is a minor problem in an otherwise likable book that reveals how world-changing events play out at the domestic level and offers a thoughtful meditation on temptation, expulsion, and what constitutes home.
October 15, 2011
A novel that works on many levels—the personal, the political and even the mythological. This Adam and "Evi" are a couple in the decidedly non-Edenic world of East Germany in 1989. Adam is a tailor, and a good one, who makes gorgeous clothes for women. And while he loves to dress them, unfortunately for Evi he also loves to undress them, and his infidelities ultimately become too much for her to bear, especially once she catches him in flagrante delicto. She takes off for greener pastures in the West, closely followed by Adam. Along the way Adam links up with Katja, a young woman whom he helps smuggle through the Hungarian border. While Adam and Katja don't have quite an affair, they're obviously attracted to one another—as Evi is to her traveling companion Michael. The narrative becomes one of a journey, as characters continue moving toward freedom and away from the confines of their original "garden." Eventually they end up in West Germany on the eve of the destruction of the Berlin Wall. Adam's pursuit of his Evi is not in vain, and she finds herself still attracted to him. All of the characters' lives get even more complicated when Evi discovers she's pregnant and is not sure who the father is. Schulze's clever plotting works on parallel tracks, so when Evi exclaims to Katja that Adam "acts like he's the first and only person on earth," the resonance goes all the way back to Genesis. A novel rich in dialogue and in its examination of a contemporary fall from grace.
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October 15, 2011
When Evelyn discovers that her boyfriend, Adam, a tailor, is dressing and undressing his female clients, she hastily packs her bags and flees for a vacation in Hungary with Adam hot on her well-dressed heels. Thus begins a madcap romantic caper set in the Eastern Bloc in 1989 and involving a turtle, human trafficking, and a mess of mixed emotions. Adam and Evelyn is a love story that is complicated and fraught with distraction, and novelist Schulze peppers the narrative with witty dialogue that reads like a play and details that vividly evoke the Soviet era. The historical backdrop of late-1980s Eastern Europe will have readers wondering if our protagonists will emerge unscathed into the newfound freedoms of the West, or if their relationship will crumble like the Berlin Wall. Like Milan Kundera's The Unbearable Lightness of Being (1984), this novel shows the difficulty of living with and loving another while squirming under the thumb of an all-powerful state.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2011, American Library Association.)