Vendor
	Liepman Literary Agency Marc Koralnik
Original language
English
Categories
Fiction & Related items
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http:// http://schlogel.ca/

THE SEARCH FOR HEINRICH SCHLOGEL

Martha Baillie

For readers of W.G. Sebald, The Search for Heinrich Schlogel is a sophisticated story with magical underpinnings and a touching protagonist you won't soon forget. This hypnotic novel opens in Tettnang, Germany, where an unnamed archivist is attempting to piece together the truth of Heinrich Schlogel's life, searching on eBay for fragments of his journals, his correspondence with his sister, and photographs from his childhood.

Heinrich Schlogel, aged twenty, escapes the claustrophobia of small-town Germany by traveling to Canada where he sets out on a long solo hike into the interior of Baffin Island. The year is 1980. His journey quickly becomes surreal, as shards of displaced and disturbing history emerge from the shifting Arctic landscape. He experiences strange encounters and inexplicable visions. Time plays tricks on him. When Heinrich, at last, returns to the isolated town of Pangnirtung, where his hike began, he discovers that thirty years have vanished. Though he has not aged the rest of the world has sped forward to 2010. His passport and money are out of date, and he fears that if he attempts to explain his bizarre predicament, either he'll be disbelieved and labeled crazy. Heinrich must somehow find his way to Toronto, where he believes his sister could be living. Meantime, befriended by an Inuit teenager, Vicky, and her grandmother, Sarah, he struggles to adapt to the sudden arrival of the 21st century, in the contemporary Inuit community where he finds himself stranded. Heinrich's story, as it unfolds, in today's disappearing North, asks us to consider our role in imagining the future into existence while considering the consequences of our past choices. MARTHA BAILLIE is the author of four novels, including The Incident Report, which was nominated for the Scotia Bank Giller Prize and was a Globe & Mail Top 100 title. Her previous novel, The Shape I Gave You, was also a national Bestseller, and her work has been translated into German and Hungarian. She herself is bilingual (French and English) and lives in Toronto.

Available products
Book Published by US: Tin House Books

Comments

Tin House

"The Search for Heinrich Schloegel is utterly distinctive, a fictional biography that drifts so imperceptibly into dream that it's impossible to tell where the reality of it ends and the fantasy begins. There's something of Nabokov here, and also something of Rip Van Winkle. Baillie has written an ode to those things that resist time, like a photograph, and those things that relinquish themselves to it, like a painting, resulting in a novel that is itself a little bit of both."

Pedlar Press

Baillie delivers a work of magical realism that captures the experience of postcolonial guilt and gives voice to a silenced past. The temporal shift works perfectly, producing an effect of ghostly haunting alongside childlike wonder.

Actes Sud

"Capacious, capricious, mischievous, The Search for Heinrich Schologel moves like a quantum experiment, defying boundaries of time, place, chronology. Fluid as light itself, animated by startling imagery, vivid and peculiar characters, The Search for Heinrich Schlogel is a hymn to brooding memory, the enduring need to inhabit story, and a haunting insistence upon endless possibilities within possibility. That is to say, hope." "Capacious, capricious, mischievous, The Search for Heinrich Schologel moves like a quantum experiment, defying boundaries of time, place, chronology. Fluid as light itself, animated by startling imagery, vivid and peculiar characters, The Search for Heinrich Schlogel is a hymn to brooding memory, the enduring need to inhabit story, and a haunting insistence upon endless possibilities within possibility. That is to say, hope."