Snow Country (2021) by Sebastian Faulks intrigued me because of its setting and premise … and I may also have been hooked by the cover. The story is in two parts and is set just before the First World War and then again in the inter-war years and tells of a number of young people in Austria who have in common that they meet at a sanatorioum in the Alps. Apart from each character’s individual story, there is a whole lot of detail of life at the time and even more discussion of life at large. In this book, which is so very character driven, the author manages to weave his fiction around the facts of what is happening in the world in the times in which the book is set. More obviously the war and the state of politics, but also the leaps they are making in the world of psychiatry and mental health. It follows the relationships and interactions between the three characters and how they manage to get on in the world despite all it throws at them. They are all very different but, at the same time, all the same. It's emotional in all the right places and also gave me food for thought as well as the chance to learn more about certain things I discovered along the way.

Snow Country by Sebastian Faulks — discrete lives | Financial Snow Country by Sebastian Faulks — discrete lives | Financial

a b Tonkin, Boyd (28 August 2009). "Inside a city of dreams: Sebastian Faulks on money, morality and modern London". The Independent . Retrieved 20 March 2012. Bit by bit, he draws together threads across multiple characters, complex wars, the growth of medical methods and political beliefs. Losing faith. Another beautifully written book by Sebastian Faulks. This is a follow on from Human Traces, but no real need to read that first. Concept started with Lena, and what Faulks had read an account in a nursing book about a mother who was only happy when she was pregnant. What’s it like for a child in this situation (& throw in alcoholism too) The research for all this was exhilarating. It took me to the Salpêtrière hospital in Paris, to Austria, to California and to remote parts of the Serengeti. In Pasadena, my wife and I climbed Mount Lowe to inspect the ruins of a mountain railway installed as part of a failed tourist attraction in 1893. Mount Lowe, with is comically paradoxical name, was to be a symbol of the doomed aspirations of my protagonists in their attempts to unriddle the mystery of our kind.Sebastian Faulk is a master storyteller and this is the perfect book to curl up with this Autumn. It is definitely one of my favourite books. Snow Countryis the second book in a planned trilogy. The first was Human Traces. It can be read as a standalone novel. Get your hands on a copy now. I will definitely be reading this again. I thought that it might turn out to be a novel about misogyny. I was mistaken.Snow Country’s infantilisation of its female characters is so blatant that it sometimes feels like a clever pastiche of patriarchal narrative conventions. For a while, I thought that it might turn out to be a novel about misogyny. I was mistaken. As the references to women as child-like, credulous and foolish continued and accelerated, I was forced to the less interesting conclusion that it is simply a misogynistic novel. The world it imagines is one in which women are in every way the inferior sex, unable to match men’s capacity to think, to feel, or to act. Lena is totally emotionally blank following the death of her mother. Blithely skipping down the road, she muses, “what a waste [her mother’s] life appeared now it was over – more like the life of an insect under a stone than of a woman in a free country.” Lena’s life will be different, she resolves: “she must see Carina’s death as a liberation.” The story is one of love that rolls over many years and twists and turns. the descriptions of cities and places gives you a real sense of wanderlust. Interest in mental health. 1: 100 people hear voices; these are consistent figures regardless of nationality, climate, nutrition. A freak of evolution. Man has discovered consciousness- but at what price? This is unique to humans.

Scala Radio Book Club: Snow Country by Sebastian Faulks Scala Radio Book Club: Snow Country by Sebastian Faulks

Anton may “have a low opinion of the human creature, the male in particular”, but he is capable of deep friendship and his love for Delphine is true. The impulsive Lena has little education and, like her mother, a weakness for alcohol, but she possesses a fierce and loyal heart. Damage cannot be undone but it is possible to reach an approximate understanding of oneself and to find solace, even love, amid the world’s uncertainties. It is a conclusion that should offer reassurance but, after Anton’s anguished existential wrestlings, contrives only to feel rather pat.

Sebastian answered, ‘Well, partly, it's because Snow Country is revisiting the territory of an earlier book I wrote called Human Traces, which came out in 2005. I wanted some of the characters in that who were children to reappear as grownups. But it's not a sequel, it has a sort of cousin relationship, you might say. It is a very interesting period. Austria in 1910, is the last gasp of the old Empire. In 1934, Austria, when the book ends, it is undergoing a kind of civil war between the left and the right.’ A fine and profoundly intelligent novel, written by an author who balances big ideas with human emotion. Wistful, yearning and wise. Elizabeth Day

Snow Country - Sebastian Faulks

Snow Country is the second book in a trilogy, but I haven’t read the first book in the series, and it worked really well for me as a stand-alone novel.

Anton goes to the sanatorium to write about it as he is a well known journalist, where he meets Lena. And this is one of the main reasons that the book was completely lost on me: there was a lot of generalised navel-gazing that was not even done well stylistically. One of the first things to put me off in the book was the way that the author actually tells us what the characters think and feel. There was no challenge to the reader to empathise or even figure out what the characters were all about. It was even more disappointing because I know that Faulks can write and that he has heard of the old advice “show, don’t tell”.

Snow Country | Sebastian Faulks | 9781786330185 | NetGalley Snow Country | Sebastian Faulks | 9781786330185 | NetGalley

Unfortunately I didn’t really connect with any of the characters and found some of them very similar and one dimensional, I had to keep recapping just to make sure who they were. THE AUTHOR: Sebastian Faulks was born in 1953, and grew up in Newbury, the son of a judge and a repertory actress. He attended Wellington College and studied at Emmanuel College, Cambridge, although he didn’t enjoy attending either institution. Cambridge in the 70s was still quite male-dominated, and he says that you had to cycle about 5 miles to meet a girl. He was the first literary editor of “The Independent”, and then went on to become deputy editor of “The Sunday Independent”. Sebastian Faulks was awarded the CBE in 2002. He and his family live in London. Mark then asked about Sebastian’s career change from journalist to author. ‘You mentioned that you were able to give up the day job as a newspaper journalist. I wonder when you yourself, actually began to believe that you did have what it takes to become a success, and you would be able to become a full-time writer.’ Celebrities' open letter to Scotland – full text and list of signatories | Politics". theguardian.com. 7 August 2014 . Retrieved 26 August 2014.Snow Country builds on the first book in a planned trilogy, Human Traces (2005); I haven’t read this yet and feel that the story would have been even more meaningful for me had I known more about the characters Thomas, Jacques and Sonia, and the evolution of modern psychiatry as portrayed in Human Traces. Nevertheless, the book stands on its own. I absolutely loved the strong, independent therapist Martha, daughter of Thomas, who gets Anton (and Lena) to open up.