Gretel and the Great War

In 1919 Vienna, a woman wanders the streets, unspeaking and without identification. A neurologist declares that the woman’s inability or reluctance to speak is the result of an unknown childhood trauma; to uncover the truth, the doctor makes an appeal to the public for information about the woman’s past. A man claiming to be the woman’s father responds. He writes that her name is Gretel and that she’ll remember him from the bedtime stories he told her as a child, a new one every night. He includes one of these stories with his letter: “A: THE ARCHITECT.” Every day for the next 26 days, the neurologist receives a new story from Gretel’s father, but the case is never resolved, and the stories vanish into archives. When the letters are placed side by side, however, a narrative emerges, depicting a daughter abandoned by her opera-obsessed mother and left with a father who largely ignores her. Other strange things happen: a bomb inside a teddy bear explodes, eliminating the opera’s prima diva and her three understudies and paving the way for Gretel’s mother’s operatic debut; a talking bird confesses that he’s a writer; an X-ray technician fights Death with ritual. Sachs (The Organs of Sense) knocks it out of the ballpark in this novel organized like a set of nested Russian dolls.