London, June 1965. Karl Braun arrives as a lodger in Pimlico: hatless, with a bow-tie, greying hair, slight in build. His new neighbours are intrigued by this cultured German gentleman who works as a piano tuner; many are fellow émigrés, who assume that he, like them, came to England to flee Hitler. That summer, Braun courts a woman, attends classical concerts, dances the twist. But as the newspapers fill with reports of the hunt for Nazi war criminals, his nightmares become increasingly worse …

I’m so happy that this important book has been re-issued. I will recommend to book groups, esp. the synagogue and Jewish book groups in which I am involved. Interestingly, I first heard about this author through a lecture on his life, just a few weeks ago.

Un gioiello che merita di essere riscoperto.
Un viaggio in una mente crudele, in una coscienza sconquassata, in una personalità vana, egoista e spietata e incapace di riconoscersi come tale - eppure si prova comprensione, anche compassione per Karl, la sua solitudine, il suo desiderio d’amore e musica e bellezza.
Ma che terribile, terribile finale.

The glass pearls… I give this book a sure fire 4 ⭐⭐⭐⭐ it is extremely well written, clever and has a lot of mystery and intrigue.

A lost masterpiece finally sees the light of day. Beautiful charcaterisation that will put you firmly on the side of a man who is obviously a war criminal.

Together, Powell and Pressburger were the greatest film-makers of all time, and their work was generally quite wholesome. Not unaware of the existence of evil – how could it be, when the Second World War looms large in most of them? – but staunch in the belief that decency might yet prevail. And then after they split, Powell torpedoed his career with the notoriously perverse Peeping Tom, so on some level I'd just assumed that Pressburger must have been the nice one. Well, more fool me. The remarkable thing here is the overlap with Peeping Tom, not just in the story concerning a monster lurking among the unsuspecting inhabitants of 1960s London, but in little details. So just as Peeping Tom saw Powell using his own family home movies as part of his murderous lead's backstory, so Pressburger lends specifics of his own biography to his protagonist, Karl Braun – despite the fact that Pressburger was a Jewish emigre whose mother died in Auschwitz, and 'Braun' is a Mengele-style war criminal, hiding under an assumed identity and waiting for the statute of limitations on his actions to run out (a time limit I had never known was even a thing, given John Demjanjuk was in the news when I first learned about the Holocaust, years after that initial deadline). And the book's opening, in particular, is an exercise in making Braun a sympathetic figure as he moves into disappointing new lodgings, gets to know the neighbours, and refuses an overture from his old comrades. But even this last feels more like a desire for a quiet life than any effort at redemption; 'Braun' has nightmares, but they're matters of fear more than guilt. He prides himself on his sense of justice, even thinks Providence must have approved of his work. As we go along Pressburger does an insidiously good job of luring us into sympathising with 'Braun', not only in his everyday life but in matters related to his hidden past, as when he builds spiralling edifices of paranoia on the slightest detail, inventing from whole cloth pursuers he's sure are about to get him – and of course we know we should be on the side of the pursuers, but we're in the quarry's head sufficiently that we go along with him. Which only deepens the sense that if one read this story from someone without a personal connection to the material, it would very likely feel inappropriate going on potentially poisonous. And from Pressburger...well, with his history one can hardly presume to call it unearned, but it still feels deeply perverse, and one can see why this novel was as unwelcome on release as Peeping Tom. I'm glad it's been rereleased, and it was certainly worth reading if only as a sidelight on those fabulous films, but even if I reread a lot more often than I do, I don't think this would be a book to which I'd want to make a return visit, not least because I'm not sure there's that much to it beyond the exercise in making the reader side with a bastard. A portrait of the sixties just before they started swinging, something about the unreliability of memory - both good, but not quite enough.

(Netgalley ARC)

A fascinating and unusual novel, which really tests the reader as to where their sympathy lies. Obviously a period piece, but offers a compelling view on the immediate post war era for the modern reader. Complex, big issues about guilt and humanity masquerading under a surface of almost mundane reality.

Karl Braun is a lonely piano tuner in London. He left Germany in the 30s and found his way to Britain before the war or did he? As his true background is gradually revealed in this slow paced but engrossing novel, it’s Karl’s own paranoia and guilt that leads to an inevitable end. He’s a sympathetic character despite his past which makes this a cleverly written story.

So this was a slow burn for me. For the majority of the book I felt that I would probably give it 3 stars (or 3.5 on story graph where I can give half stars). The closer I got to the end though the more I felt that it would be a 4 star read. I then read the Afterword that has been included in this edition and was so taken by the backstory that I wanted to give it 5 stars because it gave a whole new level of meaning to the piece.

I've plumped for 4 stars as that is how I felt about the actual novel upon finishing but let me explain myself.

This is what I would describe as a subtle novel or a quiet novel. I did not find it gripping and this for me often makes it hard to pick up a book again after a break. Don't get me wrong, I do appreciate subtlety but it's harder to remain absorbed in the world/novel. This is part of the reason I was thinking it would be 3 stars, it simply wasn't a story I was loving.

I wouldn't say that it became any more gripping by the end, it was still quiet and subtle but by that point I was consumed by the themes. The paranoia, the method of constructing lies and a new life, the questioning of the nature of humanity and inhumane acts - whether there is any reason that could exonerate you after you had committed these acts. But I was also taken with some of the smaller themes that popped up here and there - Lillian becoming incensed at the "foreign swans" after being jilted by Karl, the mirroring of Karls paranoia in Helen, and so on.

Finally I would like to say that this is almost stream of consciousness (although not quite) and therefore you won't feel immersed in the locations of the story - this did disappoint me in the scenes set in Paris - but you are deep in his thoughts and the thoughts of others, so much so that it can becoming a little disorientating when he goes down a paranoid path and then you have to realise that was is on the page isn't really happening.

This is for fans of stream of consciousness style narration (like Mrs Dalloway or Like a Mule Bringing Ice Cream To The Sun) or those who like explorations of themes around human nature and paranoia.

This a noir, the story of a man apparently normal but who running away from his past, and the hunt to try to catch him.
It's a great story, the perfect depiction of men who were involved with Nazism but were also very normal. The banality of evil that makes hard to think about such men and the horror they caused.
The author was an excellent storyteller and the story flows keeping the attention alive.
Highly recommended.
Many thanks to the publisher and Netgalley for this ARC, all opinions are mine

An utterly gripping blend of kitchen-sink realism and slow-building, noirish thriller. First published in 1966 this was the second novel by Emeric Pressburger, better known as one half of the acclaimed, film-making duo Powell and Pressburger. The novel was reviewed once, badly, and then lapsed into obscurity, perhaps because the public weren’t ready for Pressburger’s particular perspective on the actions of a fugitive, Nazi war criminal. It's an incredibly taut piece, unusual for its time when representations of Nazis were embedded in a general “them versus us” narrative, in which cartoonlike German villains were defeated by the British forces of good.

It concerns an outwardly unremarkable, middle-aged German, Karl Braun. Braun lives in a seedy, Pimlico boarding-house and scrapes a living as a piano tuner. But Braun has a secret, he’s actually a former concentration-camp doctor who butchered countless Jews in his experiments on memory and its site in the human brain. Braun has reinvented himself, living on borrowed anecdotes and waiting for the war trials to be over. He meets a girl and forms friendships with his fellow residents including Kolm a Czech Jew who fled the Nazis in the 1930s. The only traces of Braun’s former life surface in his mind, filled with overwhelming, mental images of the death of his wife and child in the notorious, Hamburg bombing raids. Yet he lives in a state of constant anxiety convinced that people are on his trail, just out of sight, determined to do him harm. Then a new trial highlights Braun’s activities in the concentration camp and he’s forced to flee.

Pressburger pulls off something extraordinary here, making Braun a rounded, almost sympathetic character, to the point where I found it hard not to root for him in his flight from justice – an image that’s gradually dispelled as Pressburger goes on to reveal the extent of Braun’s brutality and his contempt for those around him. It’s a remarkable feat, made even more so when you consider Pressburger’s own past. Pressburger was Jewish, born in Hungary, he moved to Berlin where he had a promising career at the prestigious UFA studios, a job he was forced to abandon when Hitler came to power. He later learnt of the deaths of his mother and other family members at Auschwitz. Yet Braun operates as a form of doppelgänger in Pressburger’s narrative, a distorted mirror image of its author – the remorseless Braun’s laden down with physical characteristics, experiences and a love of literature and music that echoed Pressburger’s own. A fact that adds to the poignancy and force of the piece, a vehicle perhaps for dealing with Pressburger’s particular brand of survivor’s guilt; or an attempt to understand the motivation behind the atrocities committed by seemingly-cultured men like Braun; or possibly a manifestation of his suppressed fears at what might lie behind the exteriors of the Germans he encountered in the years after the Holocaust. The last reinforced in the afterword by Pressburger’s grandson, director Kevin Macdonald, who recalls his grandfather’s desperate attempts to dodge an ambulance crew called to assist him after a dangerous fall, convinced these were orderlies sent to escort him to the gas chambers.

Despite the potentially fraught subject matter, it’s a highly-disciplined piece. As you’d expect from a writer with an impressive background in cinema, there’s a strong sense of place and careful attention to detail, all combining to present a clear, visual picture of settings and characters. It reminded me, at times, of reading Dorothy Hughes’s In a Lonely Place or Graham Greene’s depiction of the cornered Pinky in Brighton Rock. Introduced here by author Anthony Quinn.

Emeric Pressburger is best known as an Oscar-winning screenwriter, director and producer. He was also, however, the author of two novels. Killing a Mouse on Sunday, a thriller set right after the Spanish Civil War, was published to great acclaim in 1961, translated into over a dozen languages and adapted (as Behold a Pale Horse) into a Hollywood movie starring Omar Sharif and Gregory Peck. On the contrary, The Glass Pearls (1966) was given scant attention and the only review it garnered – on the Times Literary Supplement – was a damning one. The novel’s reputation has suffered since then, but its republication as part of the Faber Editions series – Faber’s reproposals of wrongly-neglected 20th century classics – should go a long way towards addressing that. And it is, indeed, high time for The Glass Pearls to be reassessed.

The novel’s premise can be briefly summed up. One morning in June 1965, nondescript piano tuner Karl Braun moves into new lodgings in Pimlico. Soon enough (too soon for that disappointed TLS reviewer), we learn that Braun is actually Dr Otto Reithmüller, a Nazi brain surgeon who conducted infamous experiments on Jewish prisoners in concentration camps. Braun hopes that he will evade punishment thanks to the twenty-year statute of limitations which is due to lapse imminently. Just before this happens, however, the term is extended by five years and, as luck would have it, a widely-reported trial shines a spotlight on Braun/Reithmüller’s past sins. The protagonist continues to conduct what seems a placid, normal life – going to concerts and plays, going out with a younger woman – while playing a game of cat-and-mouse with his real or imagined pursuers.

Stylistically, The Glass Pearls is what we would expect from a scriptwriter of Pressburger’s talent. The prose can be utilitarian, but it has a compelling streak of quasi-comedic irony. The dialogue is crisp and witty. The plot, which borrows many tropes of the noir, is taut and involving, and the final chapters are worthy of a thriller.

But what makes The Glass Pearls really worthy of rediscovery is the moral conundrum at its heart. Philosophers and psychologists trying to come to grips with the horrors of the Shoah have spoken of the “banality of evil” and questioned how ordinary people could carry out acts of sadistic violence. Pressburger explores the same themes through fiction. And he does so chillingly and disturbingly by making readers sympathise with his villian. I dare you to go through this novel without – guiltily – hoping the Braun will make it to the end unscathed. In his movies, Pressburger is intrigued by the figure of the “good German”, refusing to demonise all Germans for the atrocities of the Nazis. But what he proposes in The Glass Pearls is far more shocking – namely that a war criminal can, in many other respects, be a more than decent human being.

What are we to make of this? Was Pressburger perhaps a Nazi sympathizer? Of course not. He came from a Jewish family, had relatives (including his mother) who died in Nazi concentration camps, and escaped a similar fate only by fleeing to Paris and then on to England before the War. Yet, Pressburger gives his Nazi main character some of his own traits and life history. Perhaps this reflects a sense of survivor’s guilt on the author’s part. More importantly, it is a novelistic rendering of Hannah Arendt’s observation about Eichmann that:

The trouble... was precisely that so many were like him, and that the many were neither perverted nor sadistic, that they were, and still are, terribly and terrifyingly normal.

In the 1960’s, with memories of the Second World War still fresh and current, the “moral morass” explored by this novel would have come across as not only discomfiting but also as potentially weyward and outrageous. Six decades later, the time has come to recognise the surprising philosophical depth of Pressburger’s little thriller.

The new Faber edition has an introduction by Anthony Quinn.

4.5*

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