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THE RIGHT HAND OF SLEEP is an amazing novel, one that touches on themes of morality,
society, family, history, right, and wrong. It's a powerful story that reads like a
whisper, a cool fog, a melancholia found in the gauzy corners of one's mind.
This is the tale of Oskar Voxlauer, a likable protagonist who also has his foibles and
difficulties in life. He's remarkably human, a hero who is heroic in the most basic sense
--- someone who is just like everyone else, with worries and fears, joys and hopes. Oskar
was a teenage deserter from the Austro-Hungarian army in World War I and, as the novel
unfolds, he is returning home to the Austrian village of his birth. Back in his village he
hopes to live a calm life, a life no longer filled with the horrors, sights, and scenes he
witnessed those 20 years ago during the War and later in the Ukraine, where his Russian
lover died and his socialist ideas crumbled away.
It is 1938. Hitler has marched into Austria and the Black Shirts have come to the valley
in which Oskar was born and raised. Oskar opposes the Nazis and takes a job as a
gamekeeper in a stretch of forest high in the hills in order to get away from everything,
to live quietly. Here he meets Else Bauer, the old gamekeeper's daughter. They become
friends and live a briefly happy existence together. However, there is no escape from the
tension that continues to grow in the town. When Kurt, Else's cousin (or is he something
more?), returns to Austria as the head of the Nazis in their small village, a triangle
forms among Oskar, Else, and Kurt --- and life becomes more and more dangerous for them
all.
Filled with the richest detail, haunting and fleshed-out characters, recollections of
Oskar's wartime experiences and the Ukrainian countryside, THE RIGHT HAND OF SLEEP
deserves to sit on the same bookshelf as the great work of Charles Frasier and Michael
Ondaatje. The dialogue resonates. The narrative flows like a river at dusk.
THE RIGHT HAND OF SLEEP, the author's first novel, deserves all the critical praise and
accolades it garners, for it shows the subtlety of the human spirit and the complexities
of us all.
--- Reviewed by Jonathan Shipley
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