Darkenbloom

Menasse (Vienna) delivers an immersive, gloom-ridden tale of an Austrian town’s secrets and tensions in the months before the fall of the Berlin Wall. Lowetz, 35, reluctantly returns from Vienna to the backwater border town of Darkenbloom, where he grew up, after he inherits his family home from his mother, Eszter. Alexander Gellért, a Jewish doctor whom Eszter kept hidden during WWII, arrives from the U.S. around the same time as Lowetz, hoping to learn more about his family history. Lowetz has little to share with Gellért, who then finds help from Flocke Malnitz, a young teacher who’s been ruffling feathers around town by searching for Nazi war criminals. After Flocke is seen driving Gellért to various locations in Darkenbloom and going through town records with him, she arouses suspicion, and the plot thickens when she goes missing. The prose is overwrought (“The otherness of the place was enhanced by the infinitely slow destructive power of the vegetation”), but Menasse impresses with her portrayal of the townspeople’s guilt and lingering prejudices, as they reckon with their complicity in the Holocaust and their fear of the Hungarian refugees who are massing at the border. This unsettling novel offers a singular sense of place. (Feb.)