A Memory of War

Jim Crace

Rarely has a writer put such muscular, rigorous prose to such tender use.

New York Times Book Review

A masterful storyteller.

Paul Evans

The author of twenty-five books, including the 1978 tour de force The Mutual Friend, Busch has gained a reputation for composing erudite, elaborately plotted historical tales. His latest novel concerns Manhattan psychiatrist Alexander Lecziak, whose life changes irrevocably when a stranger walks into his office and claims to be the son of Alexander's Jewish mother and a Nazi POW. The chronicle that follows—a mystery, a love story, a meditation on identity, memory and betrayal—showcases some of the strongest writing of Busch's rich career.

Publishers Weekly

The legacies of betrayal, illicit love, guilt and loss haunt the protagonist of Busch's powerful new novel, a meditation on the long reach of history, and its aftermath of alienated souls. The son of Polish immigrants who escaped the Nazis by fleeing to England and then to the U.S., Alexander Lescziak is a successful Manhattan psychoanalyst, well trained in eliciting the secrets of the heart. Now middle-aged, long married to Liz, a painter, he becomes aware that his own life's secrets are threatening to overwhelm him. During his childhood, his mother's mysterious neurosis damaged Alex, rendering him distant and aloof. His marriage is slowly dying of desiccation, and it's possible that Liz is being unfaithful with their best friend. Alex himself has committed the ultimate moral and professional sin by commencing a passionate affair with a suicidal patient, Nella Grensen, herself a child of Holocaust survivors. Nella disappears, and a distraught Alex is simultaneously faced with another dilemma, the challenge of a smarmy man who claims he's the illegitimate son of Alex's mother and a German POW with whom she had a clandestine relationship during the family's stay in England's Lake District. Moreover, the purported half-brother, William Kessler, is a spokesperson for a group claiming that the Holocaust is a myth invented by Jews to vilify innocent Germans. (The novel is set in 1985, with the furor over President Reagan's visit to SS graves in Bitburg providing historical context.) Almost overcome with depression, Alex retreats into his imagination, conjuring up vivid scenes of his mother's adultery and his father's secret sacrifices. While the novel's emotional landscape is bleak, Busch's portrait of a man trying to surmount his demons is masterful. The author of The Night Inspector and 18 other richly insightful novels again explores the human condition with precision and compassion. 5-city author tour. (Jan.) Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information.

Library Journal

Contented psychologist Alexander Lescziak finds his life turned upside down when a new patient announces that he is Lescziak's half-brother, the result of their Jewish mother's affair with a German prisoner of war. From the author of The Night Inspector, a PEN/ Faulkner and National Book Critics Circle Award finalist. Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information.

Kirkus Reviews

A legacy of suffering, betrayal, and guilt inexorably pursues, and shapes, the protagonist of Busch’s powerfully developed 19th novel (The Night Inspector, 1999, etc.). In a seamless fusion of scene, dialogue, and reminiscence, Busch draws us into the turbulent psyche of Manhattan psychologist Alexander Lescziak, the only child of Polish refugees who had escaped the Holocaust by fleeing to England, then America. Alex’s wife Liz is in love with another man (his colleague, as it happens). His own affair with a possibly suicidal patient, Nella Grensen, has been abruptly terminated when Nella simply disappears. And his new patient—reserved, saturnine William Kessler—claims he is Lescziak’s half-brother: the child of Alex’s late mother Sylvia and a German POW she had met in England. The intensity with which these and other relationships are explored is heightened by Busch’s deft employment of interior monologue, notably in sequences where Alex remembers his own past, and also imagines in heartrending detail his mother’s adultery and enduring grief. Busch is also a virtuoso maker of revelatory extended metaphors (e.g., " [Alex’s] mind falling away from him like liquid carried by a small child in a heavy pot . . ."). But the heart of the story is contained in Lescziak’s long, wrenching conversations (in which he assumes the roles of mentor, seeker, and victim): with the appalling Kessler (a self-styled "historian" who denies that the Holocaust occurred), his dying father Januscz (his patient), a violence-prone transit policeman and Vietnam veteran, the woman detective who investigates Nella’s disappearance, the wife he’s losing and the friend (Teddy Levenson) to whom he’s losing her—each afirmly defined, unforgettable character. We come to know Alexander Lescziak as fully as we know any character in contemporary fiction, thanks to the wizardry of one of the great living masters of fictional technique. Busch at his best: nobody does it better. Author tour

From the Publisher

“Powerful . . . Compelling . . . Hypnotic . . . A profound exploration of a man at war with himself.”
—The Boston Sunday Globe

“Exquisite prose, at once delicate and muscular. This deeply felt novel adroitly juxtaposes the intellectual, the emotional, and the sensual. Probing questions of who we are merge seamlessly with the tumult of emotional upheaval and the sensation of flesh caressing flesh.”
—Chicago Tribune

“Busch examines many facets of memory, guilt, love, forgiveness, denial, holding on, and letting go. In this way, he takes a narrowly focused narrative—one man’s worries, real and imaginary—and transforms it into a peek into the emotional legacy of the twentieth century.”
—Richmond Times-Dispatch

“Irresistible . . . A novel of startling psychological intensity that explores the rewriting of history, or the imagining of it. . . . It’s to Busch’s credit that he’s able to turn his kaleidoscope with such graceful, tantalizing precision; as Alex’s search for morsels of truth turns obsessive, Busch’s snapshots become addictive.”
—Salon.com

“Beautiful, harrowing . . . In Busch’s skilled hands, past and present merge to become a sublimely haunting yet gorgeously uplifting account of one man’s need to bridge the great gulf dividing heart and mind, body and soul.”
—Elle

“SOME OF THE STRONGEST WRITING OF BUSCH’S RICH CAREER.”
—Book magazine

“Busch is a mature, elegant writer who is particularly good at exposing the vulnerabilities of male-female relationships. . . . He’s also a master of narrative understatement. . . . [He] has an extraordinary ability to observe and describe the subtext of what goes on between friends, colleagues, and couples. He understands the way the human mind dips, dives, and makes astonishing associations, while on the outside people behave in familiar, even predictable ways.”
—The Cleveland Plain Dealer

“A Memory of War draws its power from its characters as the protagonist tries to solve the puzzle of who they really are and the reader in turn tries to puzzle him out as well. . . . It delivers for its readers a vividly imagined wartime story, in language alternately subtle and striking, romantic and real, and maps out a psychological landscape that is devastated in visible and invisible ways by a war fought almost half a century before.”
—Richmond Times-Dispatch

“Frederick Busch is, surely, America’s most courageous and most focused of writers. Intelligent, compassionate, and unflinchingly adult, his new novel, A Memory of War, is an outstanding audit of the emotional legacies that haunt and disfigure contemporary American life. Rarely has a writer put such muscular, rigorous prose to such tender use.”
—JIM CRACE

“Frederick Busch moves deftly past the smoke and mirrors of wartime memory and troubled peacetime reconstructions to reveal a heartbreaking spiral of love and betrayal in two generations, one European, the other American. The writing here is beautiful, sometimes wickedly funny. Vivid as the characters of this novel are, it is history itself that is the captivating protagonist.”
—PATRICIA HAMPL

“A MEMORY OF WAR DREW ME ON FROM PAGE ONE.”
—San Diego Reader

“I am, once again, delighted and amazed and, frankly, in awe of what Frederick Busch can do with the novel as an art form. A Memory of War is a brilliant and complex meditation. . . . It’s too easy to say ‘memory’ or ‘imagination’ or ‘guilt’ or ‘love.’ It’s about all those things, but it’s about much more. Perhaps the unnameable essence of existence. And, not incidentally, the novel is also an intensely compelling story. A Memory of War is a transcendently great book.”
—ROBERT OLEN BUTLER

“Masterful . . . The legacies of betrayal, illicit love, guilt, and loss haunt the protagonist of Busch’s powerful new novel, a meditation on the long reach of history, and its aftermath of alienated souls. . . . [Busch] explores the human condition with precision and compassion.”
—Publishers Weekly (starred review)

“Busch, a versatile writer of consummate skill, dramatizes the unexpected legacies of war and complex questions of power and duty. . . . [His] ravishing, near-thriller novel, one that should earn him the larger readership he so richly deserves, places the most private of emotions within the context of a cruel and chaotic world, and reveals the oceanic depths of our capacity and penchant for both pain and pleasure.”
—Booklist (boxed and starred review)

“Unforgettable . . . Powerfully developed . . . In a seamless fusion of scene, dialogue, and reminiscence, Busch draws us into [a] turbulent psyche.”
—Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

“For all who care to linger, the pleasures of the written word are on ample display in Frederick Busch’s new novel. . . . The reward comes [from] prose that shimmers and a sensibility that respects the difficulty of devising a happy, sustainable life—in or out of wartime.”
—BookPage

“[A] RICH STORY ABOUT THE STORIES WE TELL IN SELF-DEFENSE AND SELF-ASSAULT.”
—Entertainment Weekly