![]() Olga and Herbert share everything, their views, their love, their passions, and even when they don't align ethically or morally, still Olga supports Herbert's as he runs off to the German South West Africa, and then Argentina, Chile, Brazil, Siberia, and to the Northeast Passage. Instead of harboring resentment Olga concentrated on her studies, and on her burgeoning romantic relationship with Herbert. Her German friends Herbert and Viktoria Schröder were of the manor borne, but despite their different castes they bonded until Viktoria went away and decided to be ashamed of their friendship. Her parents died of typhus when she was little, and she was raised by her paternal grandmother at arms length. Olga Nowak Rinke is a knowing child from the getgo: a natural reader, an observer, a good student, with pride in her own self. This is the second book by Bernhard Schlink I've read, and I absolutely loved both of them. Thanks to Netgalley and the publisher for providing an ARC of this book in exchange for an honest review. Yes, go for it if you are in the mood for a “wrenching tale.” ![]() Perhaps it had to do with the translation, but I’m guessing Schlink was trying to depict some of the desperation in Germany. Overall, I felt this book was distant, and perhaps that was the point. A few surprises I had already guessed were ‘revealed’ in this section. ![]() She expresses both anger and love and a bit of women’s history in Germany prior to WWI. The third section is the letters Olga wrote to Herbert beginning in 1913. Part 2 was harder to get into, with an abrupt change to different characters who knew Olga. Olga’s ‘magnetic presence’ didn’t shine in my reading of the book. Her later career option was to be a seamstress. I did not feel she ‘pursued life to the fullest.’ She taught school because there were few other options available to single women in this time period. Because of distance and personalities, they did not communicate at a deep level. I enjoyed the quick-moving first section of this book, with Olga’s life in Germany in the early twentieth century, but Olga is not an epic romance because she is ‘in love’ with a selfish wanderer. Though Olga exists in the shadows of others, she pursues life to the fullest and her magnetic presence shines.” It’s the shape we give it.”įrom the publisher: “Unfolding across decades-from the late nineteenth to the early twenty-first century-and across continents-from Germany to Africa and the Arctic…Olga is an epic romance, and a wrenching tale of a woman’s devotion to a restless man in an age of constant change. “History is not the past as it really was.
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