So, for example, during the Second World War he finds himself in the mountain to “set a series of blast holes” and “secure the forward position” – which sounds like an important task, but he “had no idea what forward position they were referring to or even what such a position might be”. Hints of the progress of wider society are filtered into Egger’s consciousness, but they are peripheral to his concerns and those of the narrative. In an illuminating moment of self-reflection we read that Egger “saw himself as a small but not unimportant cog in a gigantic machine called Progress”.

Marie responds “so quietly he wasn’t sure he’d understood her correctly”, and “Egger felt as if he was about to keel backwards off the tree stump but he stayed on his seat” – true to bathetic form. And yet, even this act – the closest to shouting or cheering that Egger would ever come – is not quite as showy as it might have been: it is largely devised by the friend to whom he turns for help, and, when the moment comes, the “M” of Marie’s name “was rather crooked, and there was a piece missing, too, so that it looked as if someone had pulled it apart in the middle”. “Ideally,” he decided, he would “inscribe his love on the mountain, in huge letters, visible for miles around to everyone in the valley”, and this is what he goes on to do, “with the devil’s ink, which was to say, with fire”. This comes to be the refrain of Egger’s existence his loudest act is his proposal to his wife, designed to “engrave itself for ever on Marie’s memory and heart”. “As a child,” we learn early on, “Andreas Egger had never shouted or cheered”. But Seethaler’s title doesn’t lie: within its 150 pages this book encompasses an entire life, that of Austrian mountain-dweller Andreas Egger. Hanya Yanagihara’s paradoxically named A Little Life, weighing in at 720 pages). The brevity of the volume seems to contradict the bold promise of its title, A Whole Life (cf. The following will be a test, then, to see how forcefully I can whisper about this Man Booker International Prize shortlisted novel. But this seems a mistreatment: its language, its length and the inclinations of its central character all call for restraint. I want to press it aggressively into people’s hands.

I want to vaunt Robert Seethaler’s A Whole Life. Loudly praising a book which, deep in the very texture of its writing, seems to shirk both loudness and praise is a troubling task. Robert Seethaler’s A Whole Life is published by Picador.

A whole life by robert seethaler