All That Lingers
All That Lingers is a sweeping family saga set in Vienna and New York that leads the reader from 1934 in Austria to life in 1960s New York City. Emma Hubner is thinking only of marrying her beloved Theo when the Nazis invade Austria. Friedrich, Count of Harzburg, wants to evade his financial difficulties and what his country is becoming. Over the course of the novel, three sets of people, working class and aristocrats, are brought together by the torturous politics of the time and have their lives unbearably altered for worse—and sometimes for better.
It is a novel of hope and human resilience. Emma and Sophie, the daughter of Emma’s good friends, are sympathetic characters that engage the reader with their battle to survive a disastrous relationship. Count Friedrich and his money-grabbing wife are characters whom one hates and loves in equal measure. This is an ambitious work of fiction, and the author has put her heart into it, but it’s possible the family story that inspired the book might be more gripping than the fiction put to paper.
It is hard to work out what the driving forces are at certain points. The story leaps from person to person before we get a chance to know them, which is unfortunate as there are promising characters to enjoy. There’s sometimes more talk than action. The two-page chapters feel rushed, and the plunge toward the post-war world means we lose so much of the sense of jeopardy expected in this kind of book. This reviewer can’t help thinking we’ve had so many WW2 books now that any new one has to climb quite a mountain to say something new.
