✍ Scribed by Bernhard Schlink
No coin nor oath required. For personal study only.
In Schlink's unremarkable stand-alone thriller, the fortunes of Georg Polger, a German living in France who's struggling to make ends meet as a translator, change after he receives an offer of steady employment translating technical manuals. The naïve Polger doesn't suspect anything untoward about the job, even after learning his employer has paid him to duplicate work already done. When he finds that his new lover, Françoise Kramsky, is covertly photographing confidential plans for a new military helicopter, Polger's search for the truth takes him to pre-9/11 New York City, where the plot goes somewhat off the rails. Schlink fails to make the transformation of his colorless, mild-mannered hero into an action figure convincing. Those looking for a more engaging protagonist will find one in the author's detective series featuring Gerald Self (Self's Murder, etc.). (Dec.)
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Georg Polger is down and out in Provence. The translating assignments that pay his bills aren’t coming fast enough. When a new translation firm opens near his village, he finds work, money, and love with Francoise, the firm’s beautiful secretary. Soon, they’re living together, and Georg’s life is perfect. But that changes when he discovers Francoise photographing diagrams of a revolutionary new helicopter that are part of his latest assignment. Francoise disappears, and Georg understands that he’s been a pawn in an espionage operation. Impetuously, Georg travels to New York to find Francoise and try to understand what happened to his perfect life. Schlink, whose Holocaust novel The Reader (1997) was a best-seller, seems bent on defying genre categorization. Individual scenes in this novel might recall Kafka and Camus, but the primary focus is on quotidian events. There’s an espionage element, but naive, self-important Georg is the easiest of marks, and the erratic Francoise is hardly a practiced seductress. In the end, this offbeat, engaging novel is simply the moving story of two flawed people. --Thomas Gaughan
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