LET IT LIE

A novel about an Austrian town with secrets it would prefer to forget.

- JAMES WOOD

We know this kind of novel. Reliable as the seasons, its opening pages disclose a familiar reality. A hovering, Godlike narrator looks down upon a European border town and begins to describe it. Since the novel is long—more than four hundred and fifty pages—and its title is also the town’s name, we anticipate a small world that will prove intricately large and tangled. The prose must first uncover the immovable furniture, then introduce the immovable inhabitants. This ancient place, doldrummed in an east-ern corner of Austria, has a mostly ruined castle, a central hotel (the Tüffer), a couple of supermarkets, and a train station that, three times in the past century, has been demolished and re-built—each time worse. Like many Eu-ropean towns, it has a mazy old quar-ter, with cobbled alleys and crowded streets, beside an uglier new section. The inhabitants include a grocer, a travel agent, a general practitioner, a mayor. Then, in August, 1989, two mys-terious men arrive. The clock of plot begins to tick.