The Electric Love Song of Fleischl Berger
Fleischl Berger’s life is shaped from the beginning by water and by electricity, a dangerous new force in 1878: his mother dies in a freak accident in an electrified sea. The child she bears as she does so barely survives, while the mother becomes “the angel of Stralsund,” a local wonder.
Fleischl finds a career first in treating the residents of the local asylum, many of them scarred by the sea themselves, then as an illusionist, and finally a participant in the early silent film industry, maker of electrified illusions. He also forms a lasting heart connection with Greta, daughter of the Stralsund sausage shop proprietor, a bond that will tie them together in frightening ways.
From the beginning, Fleischl’s life focuses on finding the answers to inexplicable questions – how his mother died, why his father went to sea and how he was lost, and finally a traumatic near-death experience that Fleischl is driven to prove really happened to him. The novel follows Fleischl through most of his life, navigating the First World War and the ominous run-up to the Second, when his Jewish mother’s inheritance marks him as a target.
The sense of time and place in this novel is extraordinary. Fleischl and Greta are deeply sympathetic even when they are wrong-headed and floundering, and the secondary characters skillfully drawn; even the villainous bear their own scars.
