Irretrievable

Opposites attract, and Helmut Holk and Christine Arne, the attractive married couple at the center of this engrossing novel by one of Germany's greatest novelists, could not be more unalike. Christine is a serious soul from a devoutly religious background. She is brooding and beautiful and devoted to her husband and their two children. Helmut is lighthearted and pleasure-loving and largely content to defer to his wife's deeper feelings and better wisdom. They live in a beautiful large house overlooking the sea, which they built themselves, and have been happily married for twenty-three years-only of late a certain tension has crept into their dealings with each other. Little jokes, casual endearments, long-meditated plans: they all hit a raw nerve. How a couple can slowly drift apart until one day they find themselves in a situation that is beyond recall, from which they cannot go back, is at the heart of this timeless story of everyday life. Theodor Fontane's great gift is to tell the story effectively in his characters' own words, listening to how they talk and fail to talk to each other, watching them turn away from their own true feelings as much as from each other.Beyond Recallis a nuanced, urbane, affectionate, and profoundly humane reckoning with the blindness of love.

Theodor Fontane (1819-1898) was a great historical novelist, critic, poet, and travel writer of nineteenth-century Germany.

Phillip Lopate is the author of the essay collections Against Joie de Vivre, Bachelorhood, Being with Children, Portrait of My Body, and Totally, Tenderly, Tragically, and of the novels The Rug Merchant and Confessions of a Summer. He lives in Brooklyn, New York.

Douglas Parmée (1914-2008) translated works by Flaubert, Zola, Baudelaire, and Chamfort, among others, including the NYRB Classics titles The Child by Jules Valle`s and Afloat by Guy de Maupassant.