The Pages

An entirely original novel in which a book—Joseph Roth's masterpiece Rebellion—narrates its own astonishing life story, from 1930s Germany to the present day, at the heart of a gripping mystery.
 
“A powerful, powerful piece of work.” —Colum McCann, best-selling author of Apeirogon

One old copy of the novel Rebellion sits in Lena Knecht’s tote bag, about to accompany her on a journey from New York to Berlin in search of a clue to the hand-drawn map on its last page. It is the brilliantly captivating voice of this novel—a first edition nearly burned by Nazis in May 1933—that is our narrator.
 
Fast-paced and tightly plotted, The Pages brings together a multitude of dazzling characters, real and invented, in a sweeping story of survival, chance, and the joys and struggles of love. At its center are Roth, an Austrian Jewish author on the run, and his wife, Friederike, who falls victim to mental illness as Europe descends into war. With vivid evocations of Germany under Nazism and today, The Pages dramatically illuminates the connections between past and present as it looks at censorship, oppression, and violence. Here is a propulsive, inspiring tale of literature over a hundred years: a novel for book lovers everywhere that will bring a fresh audience to this acclaimed writer.A New Yorker Best Book of the Year

“[The Pages] offers comments on the behavior of the other characters as well as on the act of reading, on the force that can be exerted by a seemingly powerless stack of bound pages. If you’ve ever surrendered to the 'reality' of a work of fiction, you’ll know how eloquently this book can speak.” —Alida Becker, The New York Times Book Review

“Ingenious and engaging . . . The book as narrator lives in the real world, aware that its own survival and that of its kind cannot be taken for granted. Like the hero of The Tin Drum or The Good Soldier Schweik, it is a figure of complex and unholy innocence trying to make sense of an encroaching darkness. The idea of story in The Pages is multi-layered and fabulously unstable . . . Marvellous.” —Colm Tóibín, The Guardian

“Perceptive and subtly humorous . . . Mr. Hamilton’s keen eye—which lights equally on landscape and human eccentricity—and his benevolent wit, both so evident is his superb memoir The Speckled People, here deepen and humanize a commendably erudite and earnest novel . . . All the suppleness and precision of Roth’s writing—the way he swoops from the lofty, always punctured, to the quotidian—is wonderfully conveyed in Mr. Hoffman’s graceful translation, as is the beauty of Roth’s imagery.” —Anna Mundow, The Wall Street Journal

“Admirable . . . Hamilton is at his best in several sections about Roth and his wife, Friederike. It’s in these moments that The Pages feels most effortlessly immersive, shrewdest in its psychological insights and most moving . . . [The Pages] builds to an effective thriller-like finale.” —John Williams, The New York Times

“Formally daring, richly rewarding . . . This multifaceted novel about belonging, oppression and the enduring power of storytelling is brilliantly ingenious and utterly absorbing.” —Malcolm Forbes, Minneapolis Star-Tribune

“Irish writer Hamilton performs a provocative feat . . . By astutely meshing a suspenseful quest, a sharply relevant homage to Roth, and intricate stories of persecution, exile, war, censorship, love, and anguish, Hamilton has created a tale of deep resonance.” —Donna Seaman, Booklist [starred review]

“A haunting story that provides a welcome reminder of the enduring lives of books . . . [The Pages] neatly balances realistic storylines with fanciful images described in Rebellion’s distinctive, appealing voice.” —Kirkus Reviews [starred review]

“Hamilton, who has drawn on his own Irish-German ancestry in novels such as Dublin Palms and his outstanding memoir The Speckled People, avoids indigestion with a brisk and swift narrative style that echoes Roth’s own. Although ideas of memory, legacy and repetition — the indelible imprints of history — fill The Pages, it moves with a fast and fluid gait . . . With The Pages, as with Roth himself, fable rather than reportage gains the upper hand. It reminds us that, even in an age when people 'live in a rush to forget' (Roth’s words), we must read the book of the past in order to understand the present.” —Boyd Tonkin, Financial Times

“With flair and feeling, Hamilton weaves Roth’s work through his own, in this imaginative act of storytelling.” —Irish Independent

“This book simply must be read, it’s magnificent.” —Sunday Independent

"Brilliant. It's a lovely, rich, strange book, very truthful and moving, with a beautiful ending." —Tessa Hadley

"A powerful, powerful piece of work. A wounded book making its own book. It brings so much to life—Joseph Roth, Chechnya, Germany, the art of writing, the whole notion of banning books, the lips of the past speaking to the present." —Colum McCann, best-selling author of Apeirogon

"An ingenious conceit." —John Banville

"A masterpiece. Full of great sentences. But also sort of obliteratingly moving, strange, and right." —Sebastian BarryHUGO HAMILTON is the internationally acclaimed author of the memoirs The Speckled People (a New York Times notable book, hailed as a “masterpiece” by Colm Tóibín, translated into fifteen languages, and the winner of prizes in France and Italy) and The Harbor Boys. Also the author of five novels, one collection of short stories, and an original play, he has been awarded the Order of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany for his unique contribution to literature and cross-cultural understanding. He lives in Dublin.
 Chapter | 1 |

Here I am, stored inside a piece of hand luggage, being carried through the departure lounge at JFK airport. The owner of the bag is a young woman by the name of Lena Knecht. She is getting on a flight to Europe. Bringing me home, so to speak. Back to Berlin, the city in which I was written. Where I was first printed by a small publishing house almost a hundred years ago, in 1924. Where I was rescued from the fire on the night of the book burning in May 1933. The city from which my author fled the day Hitler came to power.

My homeless author. My restless, refugee, itinerant, stateless writer on the run. Living out of a suitcase. Fleeing for his life.

His name—Joseph Roth.

The title—Rebellion.

I was born—

I came to life—between the wars. During the Weimar Republic—what they call the waiting room between the First World War and the Second World War. Between what was first thought to be the fields of honor and later became the fields of shame. A time of orphans and child poverty. Women running the cities while men were left behind on the battlefield. Defeated men who came back missing limbs and needed help to bring beer to their lips. Men with nightmares of decomposing hands emerging from the trenches. Cold winters they called God’s fist sweeping across from the East. And hunger in the blank expression of a tram conductor munching on a box of chocolates left behind by a passenger after the cinema.

A time of hardship and glamour. A time of revolution. Emancipation, cabaret—love and art without rules.

Everybody was in a club. Everybody wanted to belong to groups and social federations—chess clubs, dancing clubs, dog-breeding clubs, stamp-collecting clubs, orchid-growing clubs. Women’s fraternities. Gentlemen’s fraternities. Hunting clubs. Drinking clubs. Laughing clubs. Prankster clubs in which members challenged each other to look stupid and eat too much, or reward a passing pedestrian for permission to pour a bottle of wine into the pocket of his trousers.

Everybody was in a league or a trade union. The League of Blinded Warriors. The Association of Newspaper Vendors. The Central Association of German Watchmakers. The League of German Butchers. The League of German Brewers. The League of German Canteen Leaseholders.

Everybody was against something. Everybody had a manifesto. Right and Left. A time of envy and grievance and clubs with closed membership. When a book was no longer safe. When Hitler was already busy plotting to eliminate me and my author, and his people.

What does time mean to a book?

A book has all the time in the world. My shelf life is infinite. My secondhand value is modest. Some devoted collector might pick me up for a few dollars on eBay and keep me like a species gone into extinction. Rebellion—I have been reprinted many times. Translated into many languages. Scholars can find me in most libraries. Twice I was turned into a movie.

But here I am in person, first edition, slightly bashed up and faded. Readable as ever. A short novel about a barrel organ player who lost his leg in the First World War. The cover image shows the silhouette figure of a man with a wooden leg raising his crutch in anger at his own shadow.

Lena, my present owner, has the habit of throwing things into her bag in a congested heap—passport, purse, mobile phone, makeup, medical things, a frayed toy duck she’s had since childhood, along with a partially eaten pastry. Here I am, living in a dark sack with these fellow travelers, all hoping to be brought into the light of day when her blind hand comes diving down.

Mostly it’s her phone she picks out. How can a book compete with such an intelligent piece of equipment? It contains her whole life. All her private details, her photographs, her passwords, her intimate messages. It knows her mind and shapes her decisions. It does everything a book used to do. It behaves like an unfinished novel, constantly in progress, guessing her worst fears and her wildest dreams.

Her father was German, but he didn’t speak the language to her. He was a baker from East Germany who arrived in the United States after the Berlin Wall came down and, denied his mother tongue, didn’t want to be known as German. His eyebrows were often covered in flour. He came home from work with white eyelashes. And white floury hands that gave him the appearance of a ghost, alive and moving, his inner being left behind in a country that no longer existed. Her parents became uncoupled when she was around twelve. Her mother went back to live in Ireland and Lena stayed with her father in a two-room apartment in a suburb of Philadelphia that smelled of yeast. Where I was kept in a bookcase by the door, unread, unborrowed, until I was handed over to Lena one evening when her father was dying of cancer. In a slow voice that held on to the accent of a lost country, he made her promise to take care of me.

Look after this book like a little brother, he said.

Is the past more childish than the present? Does history need to be kept safe like part of the family?

I have been defaced a little. Some annotations were written into the margins by my original owner, a Jewish professor of German literature at the Humboldt University in Berlin. His name was David Glückstein. He drew a map on a blank page at the back. It’s more like a diagram—half map, half illustration. No specific location given. It shows a bridge crossing a stream. A path with an oak tree and a bench underneath. There is a forest to one side of the path and some farm buildings on the other. The shadows cast by the farm buildings have been sketched in as though you’d have to arrive there at the same time of day to recognize the place. It’s a private memory, drawn to remember a day on which the professor stood in the company of the woman he loved, and buried something precious under a sundial to keep it from falling into the wrong hands.

Needless to say, the map has nothing to do with me. It’s not part of the original publication. The sole purpose of a book is to live another day and tell the story ascribed to it by the author. In my case, the story of a man with a barrel organ who is down on his luck.

It could be said that I am lucky to be alive. On the night of the fire in Berlin, with a large crowd of spectators gathered on the opera house square to watch books being burned to death, I somehow managed to escape. While all those human stories were being disfigured by the flames and dispatched as smoke and charred remnants into the night sky above the State Library, the professor looked into the future and handed me over to a young student for safekeeping. The student was Lena Knecht’s grandfather. He kept me hidden inside his coat. That’s how I was rescued and passed down through the family into Lena’s possession, why she is now on a flight back to Berlin to find out where that map leads to.