{"product_id":"the-exiles-return","title":"The Exiles Return","description":"\u003cdiv style=\"width: 383px;\" class=\"wp-caption alignright\"\u003e\u003cimg src=\"https:\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0278\/7642\/5795\/files\/Second_Republic_01.jpg?v=1593111734\u0026amp;width=700\"\u003e\u003c\/div\u003e\n\u003cp\u003ePREFACE BY EDMUND DE WAAL\u003cbr\u003e328pp\u003cbr\u003eISBN 9781903155929\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eUnpublished during Elisabeth de Waal's lifetime,\u003cstrong\u003e \u003cem\u003eThe Exiles Return \u003c\/em\u003e\u003c\/strong\u003eis set in Occupied Vienna in 1954-5. It describes five people who grew up there before the war and have come back to see if they can re-establish the life they have lost.  As Edmund de Waal writes in his Preface about his grandmother's highly autobiographical novel, she \"was Viennese and this is a novel about being Viennese. As such, it is a novel about exile and about return, about the push and pull of love, anger and despair about a place which is part of your identity.\"\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThe novel begins with Professor Kuno Adler, who is Jewish and fled Vienna after the Anschluss (the events of March 1938 when Hitler’s troops marched into Austria). He is returning from New York to try and take up his old life as a research scientist. We realise through his confrontation with officialdom and with the changed fabric of the city (the lime trees are there no longer, it is hard to know who behaved well during the war and who was a Nazi sympathiser) that a refugee who goes back has a very difficult time.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eNext we are introduced to a wealthy Greek named Kanakis. Before the war his family had lived in great style with a and horses and many servants, and now the 40 year-old Kanakis has come back to try and buy an eighteenth-century \u003cem\u003ehotel particulier\u003c\/em\u003e. He meets Prince Lorenzo Grein-Lauterbach (who owes more than a little to Tadzio in \u003cem\u003eDeath in Venice\u003c\/em\u003e). Bimbo, as he is known – and the nickname is an accurate one – is a 24-year-old who, because his aristocratic, anti-Nazi parents were murdered by the Germans, was spirited away to the country during the war years and afterwards. Kanakis and he develop a gay relationship (a brave thing to write about in the 1950s) and he is kept by his older lover. But he has a sister, Princess Nina, who works in a laboratory, the same one to which Adler returns. She lives modestly in the attic of her family’s former \u003cem\u003epalais\u003c\/em\u003e, is a devout Catholic, loyal to her brother and the memory of her parents, intelligent and hard-working, but, as she perceives it, is stocky and unattractive.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eLastly, there is 18 year-old Marie-Theres, whose parents went to America just before the war; they, and her siblings, have become completely American, but Resi (as she is known, possibly with a deliberate echo of Henry James’s \u003cem\u003eWhat Maisie Knew\u003c\/em\u003e) has never fitted in and is \u003cem\u003edéplacée.\u003c\/em\u003e So she goes back to her Austrian aunt and uncle to see if she can make a life in the home country (from her parents point of view to see if she can be married off) yet here too she is an innocent abroad, unable to put down roots. Her tragedy is at the core of this moving and evocative book, which explores a very complex and interesting question: if an exile returns, how should he or she behave morally? \u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eEach of the exiles describes an aspect of the author herself. Elisabeth de Waal was brought up in the Palais Ephrussi, so wonderfully evoked by Edmund de Waal in \u003cem\u003eThe Hare with Amber Eyes\u003c\/em\u003e. Her mother’s life was the one for which the ‘startlingly beautiful’, fictional Resi was bred and should have grown into. Elisabeth herself was much more like Princess Nina, ‘a serious young girl who was, as Edmund de Waal said in an interview with Mark Lawson on BBC Radio 4’s \u003cem\u003eFront Row\u003c\/em\u003e, ‘desperate to get from one side of the Ringstrasse in this crazily marble and gilt edifice to the other side where there was this fantastically exciting university full of philosophers and economists, and she did it through sheer dogged will power.’ Yet, although there are aspects of Resi and of Nina in Elisabeth, we can imagine that Professor Adler was the character with whom she identified most. \u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eElisabeth arrived in England in 1939 and became a wartime and post-war housewife, like so many of the women in Persephone books. We can imagine her struggling with \u003cstrong\u003eHow To Run Your Home Without Help \u003c\/strong\u003eand \u003cstrong\u003ePlats du Jour.\u003c\/strong\u003e She coached children in Latin, maintained a large correspondence, and wrote a few reviews for the \u003cem\u003eTLS \u003c\/em\u003e– but mostly what she did was write novels, two in German and three in English. \u003cstrong\u003e\u003cem\u003eThe Exiles Return \u003c\/em\u003e\u003c\/strong\u003e\u003cem\u003ewa\u003c\/em\u003es the first to be published (followed by PB no. 131, \u003cstrong\u003eMilton Place\u003c\/strong\u003e.).\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eAlso available as a Persephone e-book.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cstrong\u003eEndpaper\u003c\/strong\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eEndpapers taken from a roller-printed rayon furnishing fabric designed by Jacqueline Groag for David Whitehead in 1953. A post-war, modernist textile for a post-war, modernist novel.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cstrong\u003ePicture Caption\u003c\/strong\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eVienna in the 1950s\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Elisabeth de Waal","offers":[{"title":"None","offer_id":54098807947571,"sku":"eff1789695045132","price":29.6,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true},{"title":"Tissue\/Endpaper","offer_id":54098807980339,"sku":"yau1789695045133","price":33.6,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true},{"title":"Cambridge Imprint paper","offer_id":54098808013107,"sku":"fxq1789695045134","price":38.25,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true},{"title":"Reusable fabric napkin","offer_id":54098808045875,"sku":"kqs1789695045135","price":52.26,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0989\/0578\/4627\/files\/the-exiles-return_1.jpg?v=1789695050","url":"https:\/\/sandstepclad.shop\/products\/the-exiles-return","provider":"My Store","version":"1.0","type":"link"}