From Kirkus Reviews
A powerful first novel suffering from weaknesses--winner of Germany's Ernst Willner Prize--describes the final days of WW II from two intriguingly blended viewpoints. The story's primary narrator, Hermann Karnau, is a skilled sound engineer in his late 20s who first drifts toward complicity with the Nazi war machine when he's hired to help rig up a complicated public-address system for a huge political rally. Obsessed by ``the mystery of the human voice,'' Karnau is easily enlisted in increasingly bizarre projects: ``front-line duty'' taping the sounds of combat; recording the voices of dying patients in military hospitals; and, finally, attempting to preserve for posterity the words of the Fhrer in his bunker as Russian armies approach Berlin. More improbably, Karnau is engaged to tend the five young children of a prominent national figure (identifiable as Joseph Goebbels) whose wife is giving birth again, during which time Karnau befriends the eldest child (and precocious surrogate mother to her younger siblings), eight-year-old Helga--whose narration of the chaos that afflicts her family is juxtaposed with Karnau's story. Though the parallel stories are adroitly distinguished, Beyer waits far too long to inform the reader that Karnau is remembering his version from the vantage point of 1992, when, as a ``retired security man,'' he's obliged to explain the function of a just-discovered ``sound archive'' connected to several municipal buildings in Dresden. Helga's story, by contrast, is presented in real time, as it is happening. Nor is this technical inconsistency the only flaw. The novel is further weakened by the excess space given to Karnau's often redundant ruminations on the natures of sound and speech. Nevertheless, Beyer creates an interest in his characters and makes us fear for them, and he shapes his story toward a nerve- rattling final crescendo. A good novel that might have been a much better one. --
Copyright ©1997, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.
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From Library Journal
A sound engineer obsessed with voice (and in fact all sonar phenomena) and the eight-year-old daughter of propaganda minister Goebbels are the main protagonists in this rather grim World War II novel. Herr Karnau, a "smooth, blank wax disc when others have long since been engraved with countless grooves," records all vocal ranges, from rally whoops to death rattles (while studying the tongues and aural passages of severed animal heads). He meets little Helga when surprisingly asked to mind the Goebbels children for a few days. They are also together in Hitler's bunker for the last days of the Reich, as Karnau adds der Fuhrer's stressed voice to his archives. Karnau survives, later to comment on the archives in 1992 as a "retired security man"?though officials wonder if he mightn't have been more. Helga, as one might guess, is not so lucky. Winner of Germany's Willner Prize, this is recommended?but not for the faint of heart?to larger fiction collections.?Robert E. Brown, Onondaga Cty. P.L., Syracuse, N.Y.
Copyright 1997 Reed Business Information, Inc.
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