Winner of the 2018 PEN Translation Prize
One of Publishers Weekly's Best Books of 2017
"The prose never once seems out of the author’s control, displaying precisely the serious artistry required to elevate and illuminate such harrowing material."—Publishers Weekly (starred review)
"Krall’s unique voice... dominates this detached, surreal, curiously playful tale of a woman of indefatigable resourcefulness trapped between history and her heart. A quirky but exceptional story of infinite love and life-sustaining commitment." —Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
“Hanna Krall brings Izolda R. to life through dry, factual, rhythmic prose—a litany whose cumulative effect powerfully endears her to readers.” —Slavenka Drakulić, author of S.: A Novel about the Balkans
“A stirring and powerful document that, while marvelously concise, stands at the crossroads of the horrible history of humanity in the twentieth century.” —Eric Alterman, author of What Liberal Media?
"We are sucked in by the devastating charm of Krall's art... Chasing the King of Hearts is not only a love story and a Holocaust novel. Its deep and intimate inquiry is the mystery of personality – in other words, spiritual survival in a fateless universe... Quirky and powerful treatments of the Holocaust exist in recent literature and film, but Krall's joyous and wise [protagonist] gets under your skin in ways both subversive and uplifting. Thanks to... Philip Boehm's glorious translation, you now have in your hands a masterpiece." —The Guardian
"This strange unsettling novel...is a remarkable find... The style is bluntly simple, like the affectless telling of a fable. The reader is held at a distance by a tone that is so studiedly neutral as to be almost jaunty, yet because it is relating the most appalling atrocities it becomes the more affecting." —The Sunday Times"An arresting style that rises in remarkable fashion to the challenge such a history poses to any narrator, combining steely lyricism with a thriller's tension." —The Independent
★ 2016-11-24
Polish writer Krall transmutes the real experience of a Holocaust survivor into an emotionally bleached yet devastating account of where love can take us.In a shockingly matter-of-fact tone, Krall (The Woman from Hamburg and Other True Stories, 2005, etc.) recounts the horrors of Jewish suffering during World War II in brief chapters and a terse narrative voice: "Shayek leaves to fetch his sisters but comes back without them. They committed suicide, after poisoning little Szymus. Shayek tried to find out where they were buried, but the man who dug their grave is no longer alive either." Without preamble, her short novel plunges the reader into the midst of life in the Warsaw ghetto, where bombs, lice, typhus, and death are everyday events. The book's running refrain when someone disappears is: "That's too bad….We're still here." The narrative belongs to Izolda Regensberg, who meets her husband, Shayek, on Page 1 and spends most of the remaining pages trying to save him, first from Auschwitz and later Mauthausen concentration camps. Initially she escapes from the ghetto and works to save her own family and Shayek's, dyeing her hair blonde, taking on an Aryan identity, and accepting rape by policemen as a form of currency. Her nightmare picaresque journey of arrests, escapes, and desperate negotiations continues after Shayek's arrest. She is sent into forced labor, beaten and tortured by the Gestapo, later dispatched to Auschwitz herself, and yet her indomitable resilience pushes her ever forward—and the occasional chapters set 25 years in the future, in Israel, with Izolda surrounded by grandchildren, confirm she will survive. But it's Krall's unique voice that dominates this detached, surreal, curiously playful tale of a woman of indefatigable resourcefulness trapped between history and her heart. A quirky but exceptional story of infinite love and life-sustaining commitment.
