Carry Me

by Peter Behrens Narrated by Steven Crossley

Overview

The award-winning author of The O'Briens and The Law of Dreams now gives us a devastating novel of love and family set in the violent years between 1914 and 1938 as Europe staggers between two world wars. Our narrator is Billy: born to a German father and Irish mother on the Isle of Wight summer estate of the German-Jewish Baron von Weinbrenner. This is the story of Billy and the baron's entrancing daughter, Karin, and the dangerous paths they travel as their childhood attachment deepens to a complex love overshadowed by the rise of the Nazis. Their story takes us from a golden Edwardian summer on the Isle of Wight to London under Zeppelin attack to Ireland on the brink of its War of Independence and at last to Germany in the darkening Weimar period, where Billy and Karin come of age in a country wounded by war and seething with hatreds. On Baron von Weinbrenner's stud farm outside Frankfurt, they share a passion for racehorses and for the Wild West novels of Karl May, whose dream of escape to El Llano Estacado, a richly imagined New Mexico landscape, becomes a powerful beacon of freedom as Germany marches toward Hitler, war, and the Holocaust. Richly imagined, deeply researched, and profoundly moving, Carry Me is a love story, a historical epic, and a powerful meditation on the violence of Europe's 20th century.

Editorial Reviews

The New York Times Book Review - Dennis Bock

Behrens captures his narrator's naïveté and the casual anti-Semitism of the times with great skill and intelligence.

Publishers Weekly

12/21/2015
Behrens (The Law of Dreams) grounds his bittersweet escape-from-the-Nazis love story in seascapes, landscapes, and cityscapes, showing how culture and geography shape lives and determine character. The novel consists of Billy Lange’s diary, along with assorted clippings and correspondence beginning in 1882, when Billy’s grandfather Heinrich (known as Captain Jack) registers his sea-born son Heinrich (Buck) as a German citizen who grows up to become the German-Jewish Baron von Weinbrenner’s racing skipper. Buck’s son—named Hermann but known as Billy—grows up on the Baron’s Isle of Wight retreat, his closest companion the Baron’s daughter, Karin. During World War I, Buck is arrested and interned, while Billy and his mother move first to London, then Ireland. After the war, the Baron’s patronage brings them to Germany. Karin enjoys Berlin nightlife, and Billy has unexpected prosperity working as a translator. But with Hitler on the rise, and the aging Baron unable to safeguard his family, employees, or possessions, Billy plans to escape with Karin. In scenes such as the Baron’s funeral and a zeppelin raid, Behrens avoids sentimentality, evoking instead a subtle emotional mix. Likewise, good guys providing protection from bad guys find it more challenging than in old-fashioned westerns, and triumph over tragedy proves more complicated than in traditional family sagas. Behrens thereby revitalizes the war epic, substituting grand panoramas with realistic settings and great acts of heroism with small yet powerful acts of compassion. (Feb.)

From the Publisher

"Carry Me is a moving meditation on identity and belonging, and a love story to get happily lost in." —Montreal Gazette

"Behrens captures his narrator’s naïveté and the casual anti-Semitism of the times with great skill and intelligence . . . as true an observation about human nature as there is." —Dennis Bock, The New York Times Book Review

"Peter Behrens is a powerful stylist . . . if exile is Behrens’s obsession, he’s still making it work in his fiction." —The Globe and Mail

Carry Me is "staggeringly epic." —Toronto Star

“[CARRY ME] is both poetry and cartography. . . . Behrens has mined truths so skillfully that in reading they can slip by unnoticed; they’re never glaring or contrived. They leave the reader with a feeling Billy describes as he’s driving across Germany. . . . Great writing keeps readers on this threshold, in liminal space, wanting to know and understand more than literature or life will allow, anxious for the next big lesson. CARRY ME is full of this kind of searching, characters looking for a way to map their lives against war and love and change.”
 —Heidi Sistare, Portland Press Herald
 
"Behrens is a beautiful, lyric writer. His understanding of the age and command of it, moment to moment, is impressive . . . everything is beautiful in the details, in the smallness of personal moments even as we know that no matter how calm, how peaceful the moment, it will not last."
—Jason Sheehan, NPR
 
“Carry Me's perspective on war's tragedies is beautifully composed, and heartbreakingly credible.”
—Shelf Awareness
 
“Behrens is so fine at both sweeping and granular evocations of history, so good at vividly and economically painting his minor players...[his] prose thrills to the indelible and irrevocable.”
—Washington Post
 
“Make[s] the past feel stunningly close at hand.”
—Vogue.com
 
“Stunning imagery and fully realized characters…Timely in its depiction of North America as the mythical land of hope for so many, and timeless in its exploration of the effects of bigotry and the power of love…a brilliant and entertaining read.”
—Winnipeg Free Press
 
“The story's essence is the relationship between kindred spirits Karin and Billy, but its fascination lies in the backdrop of Europe's upheaval. Set in England and Germany and moving between World War I and the rise of the Nazis, the book tracks the way allegiances shift during wartime and the devastating impact of being ‘othered,’ and not just its impact on Jews…The tension and the expertly drawn portrait of Europe at war make this novel a winner.”
—Now Magazine
 
“Vividly imagined . . . This ambitious novel provides a panoramic view of a continent and a microscopic view of two individuals hovering precariously between the two World Wars . . . Moving seamlessly back and forth between times and countries, Behrens paints a stunningly intimate portrait in wide, universal strokes.” 
—Booklist

Library Journal

09/01/2015
The author of The Law of Dreams, which received Canada's Governor General's Literary Award for Fiction in 2006, returns with another significant historical saga, set in Europe between the world wars.

Kirkus Reviews

2015-12-07
Behrens (The O'Briens, 2011, etc.) again casts his searching eye over the interaction of history and personal destiny, following two families from Edwardian England to Nazi Germany. Billy Lange and Karin Weinbrenner are born a year apart on the Isle of Wight, at the summer home maintained year-round by Billy's parents for Karin's wealthy German-Jewish father. This accident of geography gives Billy and Karin British passports and a means of escape when, three decades later, they are lovers in Germany watching with horrified disbelief as the Nazis make racist street violence an everyday event. Billy's narrative of that grim year, 1938, begins immediately following his account of his birth and alternates with the chronicle of his deepening relationship with Karin as the two grow up. Their idyllic childhood is shattered by World War I. Billy's father, the son of a German sea captain, is arrested as a spy and interned, then deported in 1919. Behrens quietly makes the point that brutality and xenophobia are regrettably universal human traits, though their manifestation in Nazi thugs is more apocalyptic than the routine cruelty of British bureaucrats. Baron von Weinbrenner, his Isle of Wight residence now confiscated, provides refuge and employment for the Langes at his estate outside Frankfurt. Behrens' sensitive insights into the human heart are evident in his characterizations. The baron, an old-school patriot who insists to the end that "Germany was his country, not [the Nazis']," is particularly poignant, but Billy's stinging self-portrait of an honorable man not quite brave enough to raise his voice against the growing madness is also powerful and disturbing. Regrettably, free-spirited Karin is more schematic, as is the uninteresting obsession with the Winnetou novels of Karl May that takes her and Billy to wintry New Mexico for a denouement that feels overly staged, though unquestionably sad. There's no doubt about Behrens' talent, but the tragic romance at the novel's center doesn't equal the power of his sobering meditations on the fragility of human decency.

Product Details

BN ID:	2940171169497
Publisher:	Recorded Books, LLC
Publication date:	02/23/2016
Edition description:	Unabridged

Read an Excerpt

This will become the story of a young woman, Karin Weinbrenner. Her story is not mine, but sometimes her story feels like the armature my life has wound itself around. I am telling it, so this story is also about me.
 
I was born 27 May 1909 on the Isle of Wight, in a house, Sanssouci, named after Frederick the Great’s summer palace at Potsdam. I was baptized Hermann Lange but for most of my life have been called Billy.
 
Sanssouci still sits on a cliff overlooking the English Channel, which on a fair day spreads out below like blue butter. The house is now a small, expensive “boutique” hotel and no longer called Sanssouci. The management offers weekend-getaway packages for anxious Londoners who desire sea views, the scent of roses, and shadowy island lanes drip­ping with fuchsia.
 
Before the First World War the house belonged to Karin’s father, Baron Hermann von Weinbrenner. He was a chemist and colorist and very rich: half the cotton shirts in the world were dyed with aniline colors he’d created. The kaiser had first given Weinbrenner his von, then raised him to the lowest rank of nobility after he married Karin’s mother, daughter of an Irish peer.
 
Baron Hermann von Weinbrenner was the second Jewish member of the Royal Yacht Squadron at Cowes, on the Isle of Wight—Lord Rothschild was the first. Weinbrenner kept a pair of very fast gaff-rigged schooners, Hermione and Hermione II, and my father, Heinrich “Buck” Lange, was his racing skipper and trusted friend. Which is why my parents were living at Sanssouci and why I was born there.
 
Birthplaces, nationality—such details have consequences in this story.
 
My grandfather—also Heinrich Lange, but known in the family as Captain Jack—was a professional sea captain out of Hamburg. The Lange family had been traders and merchants (mostly in the Baltic) for a couple of hundred years before Captain Jack persuaded a syndi­cate of uncles and cousins to speculate in the California grain trade. Which meant purchasing San Joaquin Valley wheat at Port Costa, on San Francisco Bay, and transporting the cargo to Europe aboard their own three-masted bark, Lilith, to sell on the Hamburg exchange.
 
Risky business.
 
After some very rough weather on her westward passage round Cape Horn, Lilith was one hundred and seventy-one days out of Hamburg and a thousand miles off Acapulco when my grandmother Constance, who was Irish, went into labor. A couple of hours later my father was born in the master’s cabin, the delivery assisted by Captain Jack and by Joseph the Negro cook, who cried out, “Oh, the fine fellow! He is a bucko seaman!”
 
Christened Heinrich after his father and grandfather my father was known ever after as Buck.
 
Ten days later—six months out from Hamburg––Lilith dropped anchor at Yerba Buena Cove, and Heinrich/Buck was rowed ashore and registered as a loyal subject of the German emperor by Dr. Godeffroy, the consul at San Francisco.
 
The trouble starts there. Our story would have been quite different if, instead of being born on a German ship on the high seas, Buck had waited a few weeks to be born in a comfortable San Francisco hotel room.
 
Buck Lange an American citizen? How much simpler everything might have been.
But you can’t operate on history that way. An American Buck might have joined the American Expeditionary Force in 1917. I can see him answering the call to colors. He’d have been shipped to France and killed in one of the ugly, costly battles the AEF fought in 1918—
 
I don’t want to lose you over tedious genealogy and history that must be very dim to you. This is a story of real people who lived and died, about their times and what went wrong. I shall try to be hon­est even when it’s apparent I am making things up, delivering scenes I couldn’t have witnessed.
 
I know the truth in my bones. And that’s what I shall give you.
 
I’ll include documents—newspaper clippings, telegrams, even a film poster—from the Lange family archive, which McGill University has generously agreed to house. Calling it an archive is vainglorious. A few boxes on a library shelf are all it amounts to.
 
There are entries from Karin’s journal, her Kinds of Light book. When I read them I hear her voice. Even when her entries are merely extracts from her reading, I still feel her mind at work in the process of selection.
 
You’ll find letters here, from Karin, from others. I want you to hear the voices.
 
Otherwise they are all dead, aren’t they? Otherwise, no one remembers.

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