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Gretel and the Great War
A lean, seductive, and dazzlingly inventive novel that shows us the dark side of early twentieth-century Vienna.
Vienna, 1919. A once-mighty empire has finally come crashing down—and a mysterious young woman, unable to speak, has turned up on the streets. A doctor appeals to the public for information about her past and receives a single response, from a sanatorium patient who claims to be her father.
The man reveals only her name is Gretel. But he encloses a bedtime story he asks the doctor to read aloud to her, about an Architect whose radically modern creation has caused a great scandal. The next day a second story arrives, about a Ballet Master who develops a new position of the feet. Twenty-four more stories follow in alphabetical order, about an Immunologist and a Jeweler, a Revolutionary and a Satirist, a Waif and an X-ray Technician and a Zionist.
Crossing paths and purposes, their stories interweave until a single picture emerges, that of a decadent, death-obsessed, oversexed empire buzzing with the ideas of Freud and Karl Kraus. There are artists who ape the innocence of children, and scientists who insist that children are anything but innocent . . . And then there’s Gretel’s own mother, who will do whatever it takes to sing onstage at the City Theater. Is it any wonder that this world—soon to vanish anyway in a war to end all wars—was one from which Gretel’s father wished to shelter her?
Vienna, 1919. A once-mighty empire has finally come crashing down—and a mysterious young woman, unable to speak, has turned up on the streets. A doctor appeals to the public for information about her past and receives a single response, from a sanatorium patient who claims to be her father.
The man reveals only her name is Gretel. But he encloses a bedtime story he asks the doctor to read aloud to her, about an Architect whose radically modern creation has caused a great scandal. The next day a second story arrives, about a Ballet Master who develops a new position of the feet. Twenty-four more stories follow in alphabetical order, about an Immunologist and a Jeweler, a Revolutionary and a Satirist, a Waif and an X-ray Technician and a Zionist.
Crossing paths and purposes, their stories interweave until a single picture emerges, that of a decadent, death-obsessed, oversexed empire buzzing with the ideas of Freud and Karl Kraus. There are artists who ape the innocence of children, and scientists who insist that children are anything but innocent . . . And then there’s Gretel’s own mother, who will do whatever it takes to sing onstage at the City Theater. Is it any wonder that this world—soon to vanish anyway in a war to end all wars—was one from which Gretel’s father wished to shelter her?
214 pages, Kindle Edition
First published June 11, 2024
78 people are currently reading
1595 people want to read
About the author
Adam Ehrlich Sachs
4 books112 followersAdam Ehrlich Sachs is the author of three books: Gretel and the Great War, The Organs of Sense, and Inherited Disorders. His fiction has appeared in The New Yorker, n+1, and Harper’s Magazine, and he was a finalist for the Believer Book Award and the Sami Rohr Prize for Jewish Literature. He has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the American Academy in Berlin, and he lives in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 83 reviews
September 3, 2024
As I read I felt there was something new and yet also, at the same time, something deeply familiar going on in this novel. This "new, but familiar" feeling remained an unresolved puzzle until the name "Eugene Ionesco" popped unexpectedly into my head. Yes. As soon as I realized how much I was reminded of Ionesco, the seemingly scattered pieces of "Gretel and the Great War" resolved themselves like a puzzle coming together on its own. I could appreciate the whole of the thing at once. I could come to terms with how the pointlessness of some events in this story could also feel, at the same time, full of meaning. I could appreciate the way moments of disgust could feel like moments of joyous wonder. The chaos felt rich and life-affirming, rather than nihilistic. The novel reminds me so strongly of the workings of last century's Absurdists. It gives me the same feeling of 'yes, this story is absurd, just as human life is absurd, and even so, I feel joy when reading these pages, because what I'm reading reminds me that I love to be alive."
December 17, 2024
All this took a toll on him. One can hold onto the truth for only so long when the whole world claims one is in possession of a falsehood.
Gretel and the Great War by Adam Ehrlich Sachs follows his brilliant The Organs of Sense, a consciously Bernhardian novel but one which dialled up the humour which critics often miss in the great author's work, and takes it to the realms of absurdity.
Gretel and the Great War continues the absurd humour - I doubt I will read a funnier novel this year - and also focuses on the Habsburg empire, but moving from 17th century Prague to Vienna in 1919, the year after the Empire ended.
The novel's driving premise is that, in November of that year, a girl, the eponymous Gretel, has been found wandering the street of Vienna, mute and believed by a neurologist who examined here to have being deprived of language as a child (the author acknowledges the inspiration of the Kaspar Hauser case).
The only person claiming to know of her true identity is a patient in a Carinthian sanitorium (a very Bernharian location) who claims to be her father and sends the neurologist treating her a sequence of 26 bedtime stories, starting with "A, The Architect of Advanced Age At Last Builds An Abode."
The novel we're reading is then this Alphabet Book of stories, a form of which Ehrlich Sachs has said:
The figure of the Architect is inspired by Adolf Loos and his essay Ornament und Verbrechen (Ornament and Crime), and generally the historical strand of the novel focuses on Vienna of that era as the cradle of modernism, with a cross-disciplinary group of thinkers, acquainted with one another, questioning the foundation of traditional forms. From Ehelich Sachs:
But in the fictionalised stories told in this novel, one in which characters and motifs (rambunctious children as one) recur and accumulate, takes this despising of their own fields to the point of insanity. This a scene from a coffeehouse from "The Explorer Exists In His Entirety Only On Entering the Empty Places of the Earth"
No family attachments! the explorer cries, adding: You sir, strike me as the ideal candidate to join me on my expedition into one of the last remaining void spaces on Earth. I depart on the eleventh. Will you join me?
The patron agrees, they shake hands, and the explorer—whom incidentally, no one can recall ever leaving the city, not once, not even in his youth—shuffles off to the next table, the next candidate ...
Now then, Gretel, the question remains: Why does the proprietor allow such a person in his coffeehouse? Why do the patrons still patronize it? Have you figured it out? The answer is: This coffeehouse is patronized mainly by members of a circle of poets and pseudo-revolutionaries whose aesthetic theories have led them to romantize and mimic in their work the symptomology of certain psychoses that they consider characteristic of city living, such that the "explorer" has become for them a model, mascot, and source of creative inspiration, to the point that many of them can't even start writing for the day until the "explorer" has invited them on one of his expeditions to a void space, and they have accepted, even though they've all been invited a million times already! And therefore the proprietor has been repeatedly petitioned by his own clientele not to kick the "explorer" out, much as he might like to!
Wonderful.
Gretel and the Great War by Adam Ehrlich Sachs follows his brilliant The Organs of Sense, a consciously Bernhardian novel but one which dialled up the humour which critics often miss in the great author's work, and takes it to the realms of absurdity.
Gretel and the Great War continues the absurd humour - I doubt I will read a funnier novel this year - and also focuses on the Habsburg empire, but moving from 17th century Prague to Vienna in 1919, the year after the Empire ended.
The novel's driving premise is that, in November of that year, a girl, the eponymous Gretel, has been found wandering the street of Vienna, mute and believed by a neurologist who examined here to have being deprived of language as a child (the author acknowledges the inspiration of the Kaspar Hauser case).
The only person claiming to know of her true identity is a patient in a Carinthian sanitorium (a very Bernharian location) who claims to be her father and sends the neurologist treating her a sequence of 26 bedtime stories, starting with "A, The Architect of Advanced Age At Last Builds An Abode."
The novel we're reading is then this Alphabet Book of stories, a form of which Ehrlich Sachs has said:
I started to feel that the line connecting [alphabet books] to Ovid's Metamorphoses and the Book of Genesis and the Arabian Nights, to Calvino and Perec, was the main line of literature, and the classical 19th-century novel just a bizarre aberration.
The figure of the Architect is inspired by Adolf Loos and his essay Ornament und Verbrechen (Ornament and Crime), and generally the historical strand of the novel focuses on Vienna of that era as the cradle of modernism, with a cross-disciplinary group of thinkers, acquainted with one another, questioning the foundation of traditional forms. From Ehelich Sachs:
I liked that all the key figures seemed to know one another, to eat cake in the same cafés, and to violently despise their own fields. Loos, Schoenberg, Karl Kraus, Wittgenstein. Their shared disgust at every building going up, every new piece of music performed, everything written in the newspapers and philosophy journals—every bit of it was meaningless, nonsensical, a crime. The languages of these fields had to be purged so that we stop trying to express things that cannot be expressed.
But in the fictionalised stories told in this novel, one in which characters and motifs (rambunctious children as one) recur and accumulate, takes this despising of their own fields to the point of insanity. This a scene from a coffeehouse from "The Explorer Exists In His Entirety Only On Entering the Empty Places of the Earth"
No family attachments! the explorer cries, adding: You sir, strike me as the ideal candidate to join me on my expedition into one of the last remaining void spaces on Earth. I depart on the eleventh. Will you join me?
The patron agrees, they shake hands, and the explorer—whom incidentally, no one can recall ever leaving the city, not once, not even in his youth—shuffles off to the next table, the next candidate ...
Now then, Gretel, the question remains: Why does the proprietor allow such a person in his coffeehouse? Why do the patrons still patronize it? Have you figured it out? The answer is: This coffeehouse is patronized mainly by members of a circle of poets and pseudo-revolutionaries whose aesthetic theories have led them to romantize and mimic in their work the symptomology of certain psychoses that they consider characteristic of city living, such that the "explorer" has become for them a model, mascot, and source of creative inspiration, to the point that many of them can't even start writing for the day until the "explorer" has invited them on one of his expeditions to a void space, and they have accepted, even though they've all been invited a million times already! And therefore the proprietor has been repeatedly petitioned by his own clientele not to kick the "explorer" out, much as he might like to!
Wonderful.
July 13, 2024
I knew this novel was a series of letters from a father to his (mute and incarcerated) daughter, but I was surprised, not in a pleased way, when the chapter titles were things like:
“The Architect of Advanced Age At Last Builds an Abode”
“The Ballet Master Buries Himself in the Baroque”,
Etc.
I can’t stand whimsical, and so it was clear from the start this wasn’t for me. So perhaps disregard the star rating. For some reason, I persevered, and there were some things I quite liked. Partly because I had read reviews and interviews hinting at a dark seriousness to a text that feels very frivolous, saying that it details the decadence of Pre WWI Vienna, hinting at the coming scapegoating of the Jews, all with a kind of fable/fairy tale feel.
(I hate fables though).
If I’m honest, I enjoyed interviews like this one:
https://hungermtn.netlify.app/article...
more than the book itself.
On the other hand, the parallels between then and now do seem striking, with the U.S. as the Austro-Hungarian Empire, the New York Times as the Neue Freie Presse, the real or perceived threat from the east, the bellicosity, the propaganda. Of course it's all somewhat stupider this time around, the art is worse, the bombs are bigger, the internet exists, but everything else feels about the same. So it wouldn't surprise me if it ended the same way.
With the exception of a few letters/stories in the middle, I never felt this overcame the frivolity charge—too full of little houses in the woods and rich hoteliers and ballet dancers and mad sons. The fable feel was indeed strong, in the sense that characters were not characters, they seemed like moving pieces of an idea. There was also a definite vein of nonsense literature. So this continued not being for me.
However, Ehrlich Sachs writes well on a sentence level, there’s a rhythmic, comedic bent to prose:
In the center of the park, she parted the flaps of a tend and entered the freak show. First a man came out who was much too big, then a woman who was much too small. The masses clapped. The third act without a blow to the chest with a mallet, the masses hooted, they liked that very much. The fourth had too much hair everywhere, the masses roared, they loved that!
In the above interview Ehrlich Sachs explains rather well why the book is the way it is:
At the time, I was reading a lot of children’s books to my daughter, and enjoying them more than the proper literature I was trying to read. And I think one thing I liked is how “modular” much of it is, like it’s composed of semi-interchangeable parts that snap into a single larger structure. For example, in “One Fish, Two Fish, Red Fish, Blue Fish,” there’s the overarching structure of “funny things [being] everywhere,” and the consulting of various authority figures to see if they can explain why that is, but within that structure all sorts of tales and characters are slotted in: Yink, Yop, Ish, and so forth. Same with all the alphabet books we were reading. And I started to feel that the line connecting these to Ovid's Metamorphoses and the Book of Genesis and the Arabian Nights, to Calvino and Perec, was the main line of literature, and the classical 19th-century novel just a bizarre aberration.
Hmmm, well I always was a 19th century girl.
“The Architect of Advanced Age At Last Builds an Abode”
“The Ballet Master Buries Himself in the Baroque”,
Etc.
I can’t stand whimsical, and so it was clear from the start this wasn’t for me. So perhaps disregard the star rating. For some reason, I persevered, and there were some things I quite liked. Partly because I had read reviews and interviews hinting at a dark seriousness to a text that feels very frivolous, saying that it details the decadence of Pre WWI Vienna, hinting at the coming scapegoating of the Jews, all with a kind of fable/fairy tale feel.
(I hate fables though).
If I’m honest, I enjoyed interviews like this one:
https://hungermtn.netlify.app/article...
more than the book itself.
On the other hand, the parallels between then and now do seem striking, with the U.S. as the Austro-Hungarian Empire, the New York Times as the Neue Freie Presse, the real or perceived threat from the east, the bellicosity, the propaganda. Of course it's all somewhat stupider this time around, the art is worse, the bombs are bigger, the internet exists, but everything else feels about the same. So it wouldn't surprise me if it ended the same way.
With the exception of a few letters/stories in the middle, I never felt this overcame the frivolity charge—too full of little houses in the woods and rich hoteliers and ballet dancers and mad sons. The fable feel was indeed strong, in the sense that characters were not characters, they seemed like moving pieces of an idea. There was also a definite vein of nonsense literature. So this continued not being for me.
However, Ehrlich Sachs writes well on a sentence level, there’s a rhythmic, comedic bent to prose:
In the center of the park, she parted the flaps of a tend and entered the freak show. First a man came out who was much too big, then a woman who was much too small. The masses clapped. The third act without a blow to the chest with a mallet, the masses hooted, they liked that very much. The fourth had too much hair everywhere, the masses roared, they loved that!
In the above interview Ehrlich Sachs explains rather well why the book is the way it is:
At the time, I was reading a lot of children’s books to my daughter, and enjoying them more than the proper literature I was trying to read. And I think one thing I liked is how “modular” much of it is, like it’s composed of semi-interchangeable parts that snap into a single larger structure. For example, in “One Fish, Two Fish, Red Fish, Blue Fish,” there’s the overarching structure of “funny things [being] everywhere,” and the consulting of various authority figures to see if they can explain why that is, but within that structure all sorts of tales and characters are slotted in: Yink, Yop, Ish, and so forth. Same with all the alphabet books we were reading. And I started to feel that the line connecting these to Ovid's Metamorphoses and the Book of Genesis and the Arabian Nights, to Calvino and Perec, was the main line of literature, and the classical 19th-century novel just a bizarre aberration.
Hmmm, well I always was a 19th century girl.
June 20, 2024
In the fairy tale Hansel and Gretel, two children are tricked by their evil stepmother into getting lost deep in a forest. Perhaps it’s a stretch to suggest that readers of this book must similarly make their way through a mythical forest – a rondo of fable-like tales that circle back onto themselves as characters are reintroduced and a clear picture of interwar Vienna comes into focus. By the time I got to the end, I marveled at the innovativeness of Adam Ehrlich Sachs’ craft.
Here's the conceit: a young and seemingly feral girl, Gretel, lacking for language, is discovered by a neurologist after World War I. To determine her identity, the doctor makes a public appeal, and the only answer is from a man who claims to be her father, who is in a sanatorium overseen by the good Dr. Krakauer. He sends along 26 bedtime stories for Gretel, each beginning with one of the letters of the alphabet (e.g., The Architect, the Lightening Technician, the Quarryman, the Understudy, the Waif, and ultimately, the Zionist).
As the stories progress and interconnect, a rich tapestry of themes begins to unfold: the simple, the oversimple and the complicated…the innocence of children and the evil that lies within…the fine line between story crafting and sanity, and the increasing number of storytellers who end up in the sanitorium. Dolls, flowerboxes, acting and theater, and duplicitousness begin to show up with increasing regularity, engaging readers in a thought-provoking exploration.
Gradually, the stories become increasingly disturbing, and a pattern emerges of an elegant Viennese society that is rotting away and is particularly terrorizing to its Jewish inhabitants. Lean and decadent, threaded with surreal and fantastical elements, this book of connected tales would surely benefit from multiple readings. Gretel and the Great War is a dazzling testimony to what a creative mind can wrought.
Here's the conceit: a young and seemingly feral girl, Gretel, lacking for language, is discovered by a neurologist after World War I. To determine her identity, the doctor makes a public appeal, and the only answer is from a man who claims to be her father, who is in a sanatorium overseen by the good Dr. Krakauer. He sends along 26 bedtime stories for Gretel, each beginning with one of the letters of the alphabet (e.g., The Architect, the Lightening Technician, the Quarryman, the Understudy, the Waif, and ultimately, the Zionist).
As the stories progress and interconnect, a rich tapestry of themes begins to unfold: the simple, the oversimple and the complicated…the innocence of children and the evil that lies within…the fine line between story crafting and sanity, and the increasing number of storytellers who end up in the sanitorium. Dolls, flowerboxes, acting and theater, and duplicitousness begin to show up with increasing regularity, engaging readers in a thought-provoking exploration.
Gradually, the stories become increasingly disturbing, and a pattern emerges of an elegant Viennese society that is rotting away and is particularly terrorizing to its Jewish inhabitants. Lean and decadent, threaded with surreal and fantastical elements, this book of connected tales would surely benefit from multiple readings. Gretel and the Great War is a dazzling testimony to what a creative mind can wrought.
December 24, 2023
Thanks to Netgalley and FSG for the ebook. This book is like finding a box of morality tales/fables from a hundred years ago. In 1919 Vienna, a young woman who can not speak is found walking the streets. When a doctor asks the public for any information about the woman, he gets 26 tales, one to be read to the woman, only identified as Gretel, one at a time before she goes to sleep. The tales come from a man who claims to be her father and currently resides in the local sanatorium. These tales show a society as it is about to vanish after the coming war. Haunting, with people and places appearing again and again.
May 19, 2025
It brings me such joy that strange men still sit in strange rooms and write strange books. I adored this book of “bedtime stories” and look forward to digging into more of his work!
August 20, 2024
A weird,marvellous book. Stories within stories,interwoven,looping back. A delight.
August 9, 2024
My first Adam Ehrlich Sachs novel, ‘Gretel and the Great War’ was an absolute delight. Fans of Thomas Bernhard, Mark Haber and Adam Levin should easily find themselves at home here. Written in the form of 26 short stories, one for each letter of the alphabet, I felt there was also a Grimm’s Fairy Tales or Hoffmann’s ‘Struwwelpeter’ essence to the book.
The Bernhardian element is particularly strong, set in 1919 Vienna, with lots of characters being committed to a ‘Sanatorium Dr. Krakauer’, and plenty of damming critique’s of the arts and music of the time very reminiscent of ‘Woodcutters’ or ‘The Loser’ for example.
As much as it’s possible to cite the influences, it’s also important to say that Sachs’ prose is entirely his own. His gift for wordplay and alliteration is charming, playful and inspired. Read carefully however, as he could easily trip up a less discerning reader.
Sachs has now written three novels, ‘Gretel’ being his latest. I did try to order a copy of his second, ‘The Organs of Sense’, last year but it never arrived. However I’ve recently managed to track one down, so fingers crossed it’s now in the post. His first work, ‘Inherited Disorders’ is proving harder.
Adam Ehrlich Sachs is an exciting discovery for me, it isn’t often that a new writer (or new to me at least) grabs my attention from the first page, and produces such a captivating reading experience. So I’m looking forward to reading his other two novels as soon as I can get my hands on them.
The Bernhardian element is particularly strong, set in 1919 Vienna, with lots of characters being committed to a ‘Sanatorium Dr. Krakauer’, and plenty of damming critique’s of the arts and music of the time very reminiscent of ‘Woodcutters’ or ‘The Loser’ for example.
As much as it’s possible to cite the influences, it’s also important to say that Sachs’ prose is entirely his own. His gift for wordplay and alliteration is charming, playful and inspired. Read carefully however, as he could easily trip up a less discerning reader.
Sachs has now written three novels, ‘Gretel’ being his latest. I did try to order a copy of his second, ‘The Organs of Sense’, last year but it never arrived. However I’ve recently managed to track one down, so fingers crossed it’s now in the post. His first work, ‘Inherited Disorders’ is proving harder.
Adam Ehrlich Sachs is an exciting discovery for me, it isn’t often that a new writer (or new to me at least) grabs my attention from the first page, and produces such a captivating reading experience. So I’m looking forward to reading his other two novels as soon as I can get my hands on them.
September 28, 2024
Formal experiment/puzzle novel in the Nabokov-Calvino line. Twenty-six fables with abecedarian subjects, from Architect to Zionist, meant to be read aloud to Gretel, the mute patient of a Viennese neurologist in 1919. The fables are written by a sanatorium resident claiming to be her father, stating she will understand what they are meant to convey. The fables begin to overlap, sharing characters and events, creating a mosaic portrait of fin de siecle Vienna: the decadence, the sterile obsession with high art, the nascent carnage of 1914-1945.
The chapters work as discrete fables with surprising and satisfying endings, but obviously the real fun is connecting them. Motifs emerge: various cranks obsessed with 'simplicity,' individual and mass delusions that are the exact opposite of the truth. The biggest throughline is the parent-child relationship, which becomes a kind of core sample of a society and its institutions (pairs well with The White Ribbon in this regard).
Stylistically a convincing pastiche of a certain Mitteleuropean model, lots of ironic exclamation points. Very funny, working both deadpan and hammy free-indirect modes. Great pacing: the chapters and the book as a whole are all short enough to never wear out the gimmick. The broad strokes of the 'plot,' such as it is, are not too hard to work out--at least I think I got it--but I imagine many more nuances and interconnections will reveal themselves on subsequent readings, which I'm looking forward to.
The chapters work as discrete fables with surprising and satisfying endings, but obviously the real fun is connecting them. Motifs emerge: various cranks obsessed with 'simplicity,' individual and mass delusions that are the exact opposite of the truth. The biggest throughline is the parent-child relationship, which becomes a kind of core sample of a society and its institutions (pairs well with The White Ribbon in this regard).
Stylistically a convincing pastiche of a certain Mitteleuropean model, lots of ironic exclamation points. Very funny, working both deadpan and hammy free-indirect modes. Great pacing: the chapters and the book as a whole are all short enough to never wear out the gimmick. The broad strokes of the 'plot,' such as it is, are not too hard to work out--at least I think I got it--but I imagine many more nuances and interconnections will reveal themselves on subsequent readings, which I'm looking forward to.
July 12, 2024
Yes, we all would like to be entertained at the end of the world while the madness around us reaches a fever pitch. See you at Dr. Krakauer's sanitorium, my friends.
(I cannot overstate how much fun this book is to read - Sachs gloms onto inherently funny words and phrases and pretzels them about for maximum impact, and his knack for telling a compelling story makes other writers of this doomed century look like a bunch of stumble-bummed jamokes)
(I cannot overstate how much fun this book is to read - Sachs gloms onto inherently funny words and phrases and pretzels them about for maximum impact, and his knack for telling a compelling story makes other writers of this doomed century look like a bunch of stumble-bummed jamokes)
July 31, 2024
Ambitious, inventive and darkly funny, Gretel and the Great War uses an intriguing framing device to tell a number of very short stories which contribute to a whole narrative but also the book's tone. To call it a novel of connected stories doesn't really do it justice, or define exactly what Sachs is doing, though it's true to say that characters, images, locations and institutions reappear, ideas and motifs repeat, and details are developed or contradicted in equal measure. These elements are all relayed via a set of unreliable narrators, using a historical backdrop - immediately post-WWI Vienna, where the conditions for a future war, and terrible consequences, are already gathering - as the canvas for a series of fables which owe more to fairytales than they do to Kafka and Bernhard, though those writers' stylistic tricks are again clearly present in Sachs' work. This is a rich and fascinating read.
August 9, 2024
This is very cleverly done, but it failed to keep my attention.
June 10, 2024
Gretel and the Great War embraces the structure of the abecedarium to tell 26 different bedtimes stories to a mute child named Gretel. She was found wandering the streets of post World War I in Vienna, and the doctor treating her believes her feral and to never have heard any language. After he publishes requests for information, a man who claims to be her father responds from his sanatorium with one story a day for 26 days.
Each story, seemingly its own subject, uses the letter of an alphabet to supply a career (examples: architect, ballet master, choirmaster, etc.) and then provide a short story about that person, their family, and some pivotal moment or event. The further into the alphabet, the more the reader sees recurrent images and intersections with other stories.
Stories within stories that are more concerned with the interwar years than the First World War. Although linking with many real life figures or their ideas and artistic works it is very much a liminal feeling book, the war changed Europe irreparably but a 'peace' of sorts has been established. Monarchy is gone, what will be built? The aristocrats in the stories are scrambling or heavily in denial, with many a patient being sent or choosing to go the sanatorium.
Sachs offers many stories to show a father reckoning with his failure to prepare his daughter for a world that no longer exists and the many ways a family can fall apart, and a few ways it can remain together.
Recommended to readers of non traditional fiction, Trojan horse stories or literary fiction.
I received a free digital version of this book via NetGalley thanks to the publisher.
Each story, seemingly its own subject, uses the letter of an alphabet to supply a career (examples: architect, ballet master, choirmaster, etc.) and then provide a short story about that person, their family, and some pivotal moment or event. The further into the alphabet, the more the reader sees recurrent images and intersections with other stories.
Stories within stories that are more concerned with the interwar years than the First World War. Although linking with many real life figures or their ideas and artistic works it is very much a liminal feeling book, the war changed Europe irreparably but a 'peace' of sorts has been established. Monarchy is gone, what will be built? The aristocrats in the stories are scrambling or heavily in denial, with many a patient being sent or choosing to go the sanatorium.
Sachs offers many stories to show a father reckoning with his failure to prepare his daughter for a world that no longer exists and the many ways a family can fall apart, and a few ways it can remain together.
Recommended to readers of non traditional fiction, Trojan horse stories or literary fiction.
I received a free digital version of this book via NetGalley thanks to the publisher.
June 10, 2024
Imagine the Brothers Grimm’s fairy tales reimagined and retold by someone like David Foster Wallace. Imagine also that, like “The Decameron” or “The Canterbury Tales,” the stories are subject to a single framing device—here, they are bedtime stories told to a young girl with a mysterious nervous disorder by a patient of a mental institution. Set in post-WWI Vienna. Oh, and the stories are arranged in alphabetical order, from the one about an architect to the one about a Zionist. How is that?
In many ways, “Gretel and the Great War” is as strange as that (faithful) description suggests. It is also, for the most part, very funny and, toward the end, very poignant. It is also more than a framed story collection—as we make our way through the alphabet, we begin to find our bearings by spotting recurring characters and tracing the connections through the stories’ plot lines. It is clever and entertaining, although the effect wears off as the page count grows. I suspect that multiple readings would be required to track every thread, but a certain weariness that sets in even on the first reading makes that kind of an undertaking unlikely.
Still, this is an original, inventive work that deserves and rewards the attention.
(Many thanks, as always, to Farrar, Straus and Giroux for an ARC via NetGalley.)
In many ways, “Gretel and the Great War” is as strange as that (faithful) description suggests. It is also, for the most part, very funny and, toward the end, very poignant. It is also more than a framed story collection—as we make our way through the alphabet, we begin to find our bearings by spotting recurring characters and tracing the connections through the stories’ plot lines. It is clever and entertaining, although the effect wears off as the page count grows. I suspect that multiple readings would be required to track every thread, but a certain weariness that sets in even on the first reading makes that kind of an undertaking unlikely.
Still, this is an original, inventive work that deserves and rewards the attention.
(Many thanks, as always, to Farrar, Straus and Giroux for an ARC via NetGalley.)
February 15, 2024
Thank you NetGalley and FSG Originals for the advanced digital copy in exchange for a review. All opinions are my own and are not influenced by outside factors.
True rating 2.5, but rounded down for accuracy purposes.
I'll start off with what I enjoyed about the book. I loved the whimsical, almost fairy-tale like story telling. It was a unique writing style that should be used more often. The author did a really great job at making me travel back in time to child-like wonder.
The problem I found with this was the story turned to be a little too confusing. I would have appreciated some sort of family tree or map at the end of the book just to confirm who I was reading about and where they fit into it all.
I did think the length helped with this issue quite a lot because if it were any longer, there would have been too much fluff writing. Overall, a nice break from the usual reads, but would be infinitely better with some more clarification.
Bookstagram: @marissasatheneum
True rating 2.5, but rounded down for accuracy purposes.
I'll start off with what I enjoyed about the book. I loved the whimsical, almost fairy-tale like story telling. It was a unique writing style that should be used more often. The author did a really great job at making me travel back in time to child-like wonder.
The problem I found with this was the story turned to be a little too confusing. I would have appreciated some sort of family tree or map at the end of the book just to confirm who I was reading about and where they fit into it all.
I did think the length helped with this issue quite a lot because if it were any longer, there would have been too much fluff writing. Overall, a nice break from the usual reads, but would be infinitely better with some more clarification.
Bookstagram: @marissasatheneum
July 24, 2024
A beautiful mosaic of a novel, the chapters tessellate and coalesce around each other to form a book of whimsy and deadly seriousness. Locations and places repeat as things are foretold or colored in dozens of chapters later. What previously lied in shadow comes forefront until we get a picture of a place, truly and utterly falling apart as it chugs relentlessly towards a second world war. The overarching theme slowly becomes clear as many of the stories come back around to children, their innocence gained and lost, and what it means to be in a culture where the adults have truly lost the thread.
July 19, 2024
A mute girl is found wandering around the streets of 1919 Vienna. She begins to receive stories from a man claiming to be her father. There are 26 of these in the book, one for each letter of the alphabet, each one having a cleverly alliterative title. I only made it through A-E before deciding that this was -not- a book for me. The stories seem elliptical and interlocking, nonsensical and absurd, and there are asides to Gretel (the mute girl) that assume facts not otherwise in evidence. No more, please!
August 8, 2024
I'm not sure exactly what this was, or what the point was? (Do these kinds of things need to even HAVE a point? Discuss.) However, it was SO fresh, and so different, the weaving together of so many different themes, settings, and characters through SO many different passages was skillfully done to the point of genius.
Very captivating, and tinged with the feeling of the time to the point of palpable melancholy. Definitely worth your time.
Very captivating, and tinged with the feeling of the time to the point of palpable melancholy. Definitely worth your time.
January 25, 2025
The most a novel has exceeded my expectations since I don't know when. I borrowed Gretel and the Great War out of cover curiosity (also, you know my soft spot for the German-speaking world) and finished it last night in a loopy daze. More than five years ago, I wrote in my review for Locus Solus that "there will never be another Locus Solus." Well, 110 years later, the next of kin has arrived. Sachs' version is more formally daring (an abecedarian series of bedtime stories told in floating paragraphs), less frivolous (set in WWI-era Vienna, where history is very real), and just as sweetly absurd (stories inside of stories, branching realities, no guard rails for the reader!). A wise and funny man once told me that humor is a series of logical steps that results in an illogical conclusion. That's what every chapter of this book feels like: a carefully constructed proof wherein the QED is not, in fact, what was to be demonstrated. You can, of course, observe patterns in the outcomes: 30% chance someone gets committed to the Sanatorium Dr. Krakauer, 25% chance of a tragedy of a different nature, 20% chance of a belated epiphany, etc. The fates and triumphs of mankind parade across these pages, as do memorable characters and moments. Take, for instance, the General Intendant of the City Theater, whose mute daughter he casts as the star of a new play; the climactic scene, however, requires her to shout Your name is Bohuslav, you are a bricklayer!, which the foiled starlet will deny ever happened because "[she], too, is committed to the role" (G). Or the architect who insists on an unseen simplicity (A, Q), or the astonishingly paraphrased "Account of a Young Woman Wrongfully Incarcerated" (F), or the Duke and his seven-layered confection (H), or the knockout ventriloquist tale that ends on a note of hope (V)—
"Now, what happens next is the part of this tale he'll tell his grandchildren when they beg him for stories from the war. The rest of it will simply drift away, because the world is good and we retain the things that show us that."
A perfect gift for the philosopher, ballerina, or imagineer in your life.
74 (corridor), 149 (child), 162 (St. Wolfgang)
"Now, what happens next is the part of this tale he'll tell his grandchildren when they beg him for stories from the war. The rest of it will simply drift away, because the world is good and we retain the things that show us that."
A perfect gift for the philosopher, ballerina, or imagineer in your life.
74 (corridor), 149 (child), 162 (St. Wolfgang)
April 17, 2025
4.5
i kind of loved this... Absurd and funny... exposing/dissecting corruption through creepy fairy tale-esque stories... the fact that they all connected...
I really like a story that can weave in philosophical ideas without being boring or opaque. This one was fun, truly a fun house mirror, making you think you know what's right and what's wrong, who's the good guy and who's the villain, then pulling the rug out from under you. An underlying sense of dread follows through the whole book.
"this bedtime story is a warning to anyone who chooses to remain asleep. "
i kind of loved this... Absurd and funny... exposing/dissecting corruption through creepy fairy tale-esque stories... the fact that they all connected...
I really like a story that can weave in philosophical ideas without being boring or opaque. This one was fun, truly a fun house mirror, making you think you know what's right and what's wrong, who's the good guy and who's the villain, then pulling the rug out from under you. An underlying sense of dread follows through the whole book.
"this bedtime story is a warning to anyone who chooses to remain asleep. "
October 3, 2025
Playful, mysterious, heart-wrenching, full of character - just a joy to read! I did feel it was a bit scattered, and it could have been a bit cleaner around the edges (especially the end!), but I thoroughly enjoyed this.
March 20, 2025
I’ve never read anything like this! So witty and fun to read. It’s basically a collection of interconnected fairytale-esque short stories with underlying themes of psychiatry and politics in Vienna after WWI. I wish I knew more about the history of this period bc I feel like there were so many subtle historical references that went over my head but it’s such a layered book I’ll probably reread eventually anyways. Be warned tho if you don’t like books without cohesive plot
October 16, 2024
This was not a long book but I just couldn’t get into it.
The story takes place in Vienna in the early 1900’s. A lone girl is found and unable to speak. Her doctor reaches out to the public in search of information. A patient in a sanatorium responds claiming her. He sends one letter a day for 26 days… one for each letter of the alphabet. Each chapter of the book recounts those letters. The supposed father requests that each letter is to be read as a bedtime story. In fable and fairy tale fashion the stories circle and cross each other. The writing is clever but the overarching story did not grasp my interest.
The story takes place in Vienna in the early 1900’s. A lone girl is found and unable to speak. Her doctor reaches out to the public in search of information. A patient in a sanatorium responds claiming her. He sends one letter a day for 26 days… one for each letter of the alphabet. Each chapter of the book recounts those letters. The supposed father requests that each letter is to be read as a bedtime story. In fable and fairy tale fashion the stories circle and cross each other. The writing is clever but the overarching story did not grasp my interest.
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
August 1, 2024
A clever-clever, drily witty short read that I almost gave up on after five chapters. The mistake I made was reading this in short snatches over three or four days, when it really needs to be read in one sitting. Doing it this way failed to accentuate the subtlety of the interlocking stories from the start, but when it became apparent what the author was doing this became a delightfully fun read.
Stories within stories within stories, there is a cast of shapeshifting folkloric characters who pop up in each others chapters, gradually filling out the puzzle Sachs is so cleverly constructing. I really need to go back and read it again.
Stories within stories within stories, there is a cast of shapeshifting folkloric characters who pop up in each others chapters, gradually filling out the puzzle Sachs is so cleverly constructing. I really need to go back and read it again.
September 26, 2024
An original and clever novel set in 1919 Vienna. In short chapters structured around characters whose occupations begin with each letter of the alphabet, Sachs gives us a set of linked fables written as a letter from a father in a sanatorium to his mute daughter, Gretel. I was impressed by the writing which often felt as if it was written in an older style with absurd and macabre elements. I recommend reading this closely as often characters spring up in future chapters and, when I tended to put this down and come back to it, I found myself somewhat confused. There are plenty of historical subtexts which are interesting to detect as you read.
June 30, 2024
A delightful foray into the folkloric, as applied to a fin de siècle (but unnamed) Vienna. 26 interlocking tales, for the 26 letters of the alphabet, full of alliteration, repetition, flights of fancy - and the regular smack of brute reality - like all the best (pre-Disney) fairytales. Over all looms the Sanitorium of Dr Krakauer, which is more than ready to admit those whose search for new forms of expression lead themto madness.
April 3, 2024
Gretel and the Great War takes on a very interesting form - being made up of 26 "bedtime" stories, each beginning with a character who corresponds the letters of the alphabet ie the architect, the ballerina, and so forth. The stories build on each other in subtle ways and each one is absurd, quite silly, and pretty dark. An interesting and unique read! This book publishes on June 11th.
July 24, 2024
Witty and funny and unsettling and a brilliant look into Adam’s mind and also the world of children. Nearly written for and about children but in an appropriated and twisted adult manner with constant subtle socio-political commentary. It was a joy to read something that reminded me of Roald Dahl with nonsensical twists and turns— I think I quite miss that style of writing.
September 12, 2024
Gretel and the Great War was an innovative and original story that at first was difficult to get into but as the book progressed and the 26 short stories started to intertwine, I marveled at Sach’s creativity. I think the greater historical context and allusions went over my head, but I still enjoyed it.
September 19, 2024
I wouldn't guess this will be a popular book for many, not that that is a goal for me personally. I kept plodding through this novel thinking I knew where things were going and then arrived at a completely bizarre ending which made no sense at all. Ostensibly, this book is about how life in the city made no sense and was like a poison to growing children and adults-a world changing.
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