And all that’s left for you then is darkness. And in the last patch of sky you see before they finally shovel the earth in over you she reappears and breathes on you. She seizes you as she passes and takes you with her and sticks you in some hole. She comes when she wants and takes what she needs. She walks on the mountain and steals through the valley.

I say death brings forth nothing at all! Death is the Cold Lady. People say death brings forth new life, but people are stupider than the stupidest nanny goat. As the pair descends the mountain, the goatherd relates his understanding of death to Egger, now in his late thirties, thus: Something close to a moral is also delivered in this first section-a sound authorial choice, as the lesson, if that is what it is, then hovers over the reading rather than end-stopping it. Though its construction recalls the beginning of Kafka’s Metamorphosis (an echo brilliantly replicated by Charlotte Collins’ marvelously confident translation), it is rather the choice of words, heavy with filth and mortality, that signals the book’s interests as being far from pastoral in any idealized sense. On a February morning in the year 1933 Andreas Egger lifted the dying goatherd Johannes Kalischka, known to all the valley dwellers as Horned Hannes, off his sodden and rather sour-smelling pallet to carry him down to the village along the three-kilometer mountain path that lay buried beneath a thick layer of snow. The tour-de force first sentence offers readers perhaps the first clue to the novel’s tone: The novel’s first scene, which appears, as do occasional other episodes, outside the generally steady chronology of protagonist Andreas Egger’s life, involves an encounter with death.

What is it, really, that a reader looks for from an encounter with a foreign life, whether fictional or real? What impulses, dark or ennobling, attract us to a work of literature in the first place? The facts that the man in question is a resident of a tiny Austrian alpine town, and that his life spans the first three tumultuous quarters of the twentieth century do not at first glance contradict the assumption that the reader will find little fodder here for her darker impulses. A Whole Life is in fact just that: a compressed chronicle of one man’s entire life, from birth (nearly) to death.

Apparently, if we are to believe the venerable Swiss newspaper Neue Zürcher Zeitung, Robert Seethaler’s slim latest work, A Whole Life, is “a novel for sadists.” Such a proclamation seems an extreme one for a book whose diminutive size and unpretentious premise fairly trumpet harmlessness.

A whole life seethaler