“You have to be like Switzerland,” she tells him. Gustav’s mother has offered him one chief lesson: he must “master himself,” as, she says, his late father did before him. The year is 1947, and the postwar mood is grim, yet Gustav finds patches of color, flavor, and beauty in the drab, gray world he and Emilie inhabit: the dark purple of a nearly new lipstick he discovers in the gratings of the church he and his mother clean to supplement her income from working in a cheese cooperative the taste of Emilie’s knodel the bloom of the cherry tree in their building’s courtyard. When we first meet Gustav, the protagonist of Tremain’s ( Merivel: A Man of His Time, 2012, etc.) exquisite novel, he is 5 years old and living with his none-too-happy widowed mother, Emilie, in their extremely modest apartment in the small Swiss town of Matzlingen. Like an intense, beautiful, and deeply moving piece of music, Tremain’s captivating historical novel hits all the right notes.
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