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What Remains
One of America's most acclaimed literary talents delivers a deeply moving, memoir-oriented novel about a German-Jewish family's attempts to resettle in the aftermath of World War II.
- GenresFiction
208 pages, Paperback
First published November 6, 2000
8 people are currently reading
65 people want to read
About the author
Nicholas Delbanco
98 books18 followersNicholas Delbanco is the Robert Frost Distinguished University Professor of English Language and Literature at the University of Michigan and Chair of the Hopwood Committee. He has published twenty-five books of fiction and non-fiction. His most recent novels are The Count of Concord and Spring and Fall; his most recent works of non-fiction are The Countess of Stanlein Restored and The Lost Suitcase: Reflections on the Literary Life. As editor he has compiled the work of, among others, John Gardner and Bernard Malamud. The long-term Director of the MFA Program as well as the Hopwood Awards Program at the University of Michigan, he has served as Chair of the Fiction Panel for the National Book Awards, received a Guggenheim Fellowship and, twice, a National Endowment for the Arts Writing Fellowship. Professor Delbanco has just completed a teaching text for McGraw-Hill entitled Literature: Craft and Voice, a three-volume Introduction to Literature of which he is the co-editor with Alan Cheuse; in 2004 he published The Sincerest Form: Writiing Fiction by Imitation. His new non-fiction book, Lastingness: The Art of Old Age will be published by Grand Central Publishing in 2011.
Full Biography
NOTE: The following biography was composed in 2000 by Jon Manchip White and reflects information only up to and including that year.
Nationality: American. Born: London, England, 1942. Education: Harvard University, B.A. 1963; Columbia University, M.A. 1966. Career: Member of Department of Language and Literature, Bennington College, Bennington, Vermont, 1966-84, writing workshop director, 1977-84; professor of English, Skidmore College, Saratoga Springs, New York, 1984-85; Robert Frost Professor of English Language and Literature, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, 1985—. Awards: National Endowment for the Arts creative writing award, 1973, 1982; National Endowment of Composers and Librettists fellowship, 1976; Guggenheim fellowship, 1980; Woodrow Wilson fellowship; Edward John Noble fellowship; New York State CAPS Award; Vermont Council of the Arts Award; Michigan Council of the Arts Award. Agent: Brandt & Brandt Literary Agents, Inc., 1501 Broadway, New York, New York 10036, U.S.A.
As a novelist, Nicholas Delbanco can be considered doubly fortunate in that he has always been able to draw inspiration and sustenance from two continents and two cultures.
Of Italian and German descent, he was born in London at the height of the German Blitz, and his family did not depart for America until he was six, and he was not naturalized as an American citizen until he was eleven. It is not surprising that, though later he would anchor himself firmly in New England and particularly in Vermont, and more recently in Michigan as the Robert Frost Professor of English Language and Literature, the influence of his European origins would play a consistent part in his fiction and non-fiction alike.
The cultural ambivalence, if such it may be called, manifested itself early. At Harvard, his B.A. thesis was devoted to a joint study of Rilke and Heredia, two noteworthy wanderers, and the subject of his M.A. thesis was that tragic outcast, Malcolm Lowry. Examining the numerous novels Delbanco has published to date, one finds that only five are set exclusively in the United States and that the majority are set, either in whole or part, in Provence, Tuscany, Greece, Switzerland, or as far afield as Barbados and Mexico. Several of his non-fiction books are concerned with Europe, one of them a study of that remarkable group of literary exiles, including Conrad, Crane, and James, who lived and worked together in a small corner of England at the turn of the last century. Indeed, one of the courses Delbanco has taught over the years is specifically entitled “Exiles,” and is devoted to Becket, Conrad, and Nabokov, while other courses have featured a gallery of roving and displaced novelists such as Joyce, Lawrence, Forster, Ford, Mann, Fitzgerald, and He
Full Biography
NOTE: The following biography was composed in 2000 by Jon Manchip White and reflects information only up to and including that year.
Nationality: American. Born: London, England, 1942. Education: Harvard University, B.A. 1963; Columbia University, M.A. 1966. Career: Member of Department of Language and Literature, Bennington College, Bennington, Vermont, 1966-84, writing workshop director, 1977-84; professor of English, Skidmore College, Saratoga Springs, New York, 1984-85; Robert Frost Professor of English Language and Literature, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, 1985—. Awards: National Endowment for the Arts creative writing award, 1973, 1982; National Endowment of Composers and Librettists fellowship, 1976; Guggenheim fellowship, 1980; Woodrow Wilson fellowship; Edward John Noble fellowship; New York State CAPS Award; Vermont Council of the Arts Award; Michigan Council of the Arts Award. Agent: Brandt & Brandt Literary Agents, Inc., 1501 Broadway, New York, New York 10036, U.S.A.
As a novelist, Nicholas Delbanco can be considered doubly fortunate in that he has always been able to draw inspiration and sustenance from two continents and two cultures.
Of Italian and German descent, he was born in London at the height of the German Blitz, and his family did not depart for America until he was six, and he was not naturalized as an American citizen until he was eleven. It is not surprising that, though later he would anchor himself firmly in New England and particularly in Vermont, and more recently in Michigan as the Robert Frost Professor of English Language and Literature, the influence of his European origins would play a consistent part in his fiction and non-fiction alike.
The cultural ambivalence, if such it may be called, manifested itself early. At Harvard, his B.A. thesis was devoted to a joint study of Rilke and Heredia, two noteworthy wanderers, and the subject of his M.A. thesis was that tragic outcast, Malcolm Lowry. Examining the numerous novels Delbanco has published to date, one finds that only five are set exclusively in the United States and that the majority are set, either in whole or part, in Provence, Tuscany, Greece, Switzerland, or as far afield as Barbados and Mexico. Several of his non-fiction books are concerned with Europe, one of them a study of that remarkable group of literary exiles, including Conrad, Crane, and James, who lived and worked together in a small corner of England at the turn of the last century. Indeed, one of the courses Delbanco has taught over the years is specifically entitled “Exiles,” and is devoted to Becket, Conrad, and Nabokov, while other courses have featured a gallery of roving and displaced novelists such as Joyce, Lawrence, Forster, Ford, Mann, Fitzgerald, and He
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Displaying 1 - 8 of 8 reviews
September 8, 2022
Perhaps my favorite of Delbanco's novels, although I think this is barely a novel. See short review I wrote of this in 2003 below
Here's the guts of the short review:
Nicholas Delbanco's 2000 novel What Remains takes its title from lines by Ezra Pound: "What thou lovest well remains, / the rest is dross." The phrase becomes the standard by which memories are measured, and the memories in this quiet little book seem to escape the realm of fiction and feel very much like memoir.
What Remains tells the story of a family of German Jews who have escaped from the Nazis a few years before escape became impossible. Karl, his wife, Julia, and his brother, Gustave, have made successful lives for themselves in London, the first brother in business and the second as an art dealer, and they live in comfort even during the worst of World War II. These are people who recite Goethe at the dinner table, play Mozart's chamber music together in the evening, and have a Kollwitz hanging on the wall. Although most of the book takes place in England during the last years of the war and the years immediately following, the family's immigration to America — at least the move by Karl, Julia, and their two sons, Jacob and Ben — is the action, set offstage, that gives poignancy to what is remembered. Karl defines the larger meaning of these moves in terms of his heritage: "In 1630 his family left Italy; in 1670 his ancestors were driven from Vienna and traveled on to Hamburg and resided there in comfort until Hitler threw them out. It isn't a question of whether but when: death and displacement will come."
The novel is framed by first-person chapters where Ben (who sounds suspiciously like Delbanco himself, even down to the names of his wife and daughters) returns to London to revisit the home where he lived as a very young child. When there, he is overwhelmed by memory: "For some time I wander around the locked house, full of nostalgia and what I can only call Proustian remembrance: this is the corner where that happened, here is the window I rubbed at to peer through the chill wintry fog." Later he finds that he has visited the wrong house; his family actually lived a bit down the street. That uncertain certainty of memory gives this book its center; it also makes the book a "novel."
In What Remains Delbanco is concerned with how fragments of memory rise up and color the present. He cares deeply about the characters he is writing about, and the death of Julia, many years after the family arrives in this country, is as moving a piece of writing as this author has done in his twenty-some books. Delbanco has long been respected as a stylist, and I think this beautiful book of fragmented memory may contain his best marriage of style with content. It is impossible to imagine this story told any other way.
https://annarborobserver.com/articles...
Here's the guts of the short review:
Nicholas Delbanco's 2000 novel What Remains takes its title from lines by Ezra Pound: "What thou lovest well remains, / the rest is dross." The phrase becomes the standard by which memories are measured, and the memories in this quiet little book seem to escape the realm of fiction and feel very much like memoir.
What Remains tells the story of a family of German Jews who have escaped from the Nazis a few years before escape became impossible. Karl, his wife, Julia, and his brother, Gustave, have made successful lives for themselves in London, the first brother in business and the second as an art dealer, and they live in comfort even during the worst of World War II. These are people who recite Goethe at the dinner table, play Mozart's chamber music together in the evening, and have a Kollwitz hanging on the wall. Although most of the book takes place in England during the last years of the war and the years immediately following, the family's immigration to America — at least the move by Karl, Julia, and their two sons, Jacob and Ben — is the action, set offstage, that gives poignancy to what is remembered. Karl defines the larger meaning of these moves in terms of his heritage: "In 1630 his family left Italy; in 1670 his ancestors were driven from Vienna and traveled on to Hamburg and resided there in comfort until Hitler threw them out. It isn't a question of whether but when: death and displacement will come."
The novel is framed by first-person chapters where Ben (who sounds suspiciously like Delbanco himself, even down to the names of his wife and daughters) returns to London to revisit the home where he lived as a very young child. When there, he is overwhelmed by memory: "For some time I wander around the locked house, full of nostalgia and what I can only call Proustian remembrance: this is the corner where that happened, here is the window I rubbed at to peer through the chill wintry fog." Later he finds that he has visited the wrong house; his family actually lived a bit down the street. That uncertain certainty of memory gives this book its center; it also makes the book a "novel."
In What Remains Delbanco is concerned with how fragments of memory rise up and color the present. He cares deeply about the characters he is writing about, and the death of Julia, many years after the family arrives in this country, is as moving a piece of writing as this author has done in his twenty-some books. Delbanco has long been respected as a stylist, and I think this beautiful book of fragmented memory may contain his best marriage of style with content. It is impossible to imagine this story told any other way.
https://annarborobserver.com/articles...
April 5, 2011
I tried... It is suppose to be a book about a Jewish German family who is wealthy and moves out of Germany to London and then to the U.S. around the 2nd World War. Is isn't that the story and characters were uninteresting. It was that the way it was written the father who is an artist who had an intersting eye and good artist collection is written about in the most pedestrian of ways. After 85 pages, I didn't really care about the characters. Oh well....
April 23, 2010
It's a good description of well off German Jews who left Germany just in time to escape the Holocaust. They left everything behind in Germany except their sense of themselves. It makes for an interesting story. No dramatics here.
October 28, 2015
Although a lot of people didn't like this book, I enjoyed it. It is deemed fiction, but it is almost memoir, mirroring the author's own life. He is the son of German Jews who first fled Germany and settled in England, later moving to the United States.
December 7, 2012
It was ok. The story of this Jewish family's life after leaving Nazi Germany was an interesting insight. I think I would've enjoyed it more if I spoke German, since the author throws in phrases here and there. The one thing I couldn't stand however, was the writing style. I know that our thoughts are somewhat disjointed, especially as children. I suppose the author captured that well, but it was very hard to read the run-on sentences and thoughts without punctuation.
February 3, 2013
The writing is lucid and enjoyable. The point of view shifts repeatedly and memories are joined in the story's present and the distant past. Character development is sometimes incomplete but motivations are persuasive.
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December 5, 2009i need the climax,conflict,point of view and theme of this novel. please help me...i lub dis novel..if u answer my request send me n thid email niwalym@yahoo.com..thank you !
November 13, 2010
particularly compelling as I was lucky enough to have worked with Nick for a few years.
Displaying 1 - 8 of 8 reviews